
Book J"P^ 

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rOPVRlGHT DEPOStr 



LITTLE MASTERPIECES 



Little Masterpieces 

Edited by Bliss Perry 



RALPH WALD O 
' EMERSON 

History Self- Reliance 

Nature Spiritual Laws 

The American Scholar 




NEW YORK 
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 



1901 



The LIBRARY OF 

GONGRESS, 
Two Corti£8 Heoeived 

DEC. 9 1901 

Copyright entry 
CLASS ^:^XXa Nu.| 

COPY a 



r^ lu:^. 



^ 



Cop)n-ight, 1901, by 

DOUBLEDAY, PaGE & COMPANY 



Used by permission of^ and by arrangement withy 

Houghton, Mifflin &=> Company, 
the sole publishers 0/ Emerson's complete writings 



etc t « etc 



CONTENTS. 





PAGE 


Editor's Introduction, . 


. vii 


History, 


. . 1 


Self-Reliance, .... 


. 41 


Nature, 


. 83 


Spiritual Laws, 


. . Ill 


The American Scholar, . 


. . 147 



Editor's Introduction 



Editor's Introduction. 

Of the five complete productions of Emer- 
son v^hich appear in this volume, three 
(^^History/^ ''Self-Rehance," and ^'Spiritual 
Laws' ') are chosen from the first series of his 
* ^Essays," published in 1841. The essay on 
' 'Nature, '^ reprinted here, was first published 
in the second series of Essays" in 1844, and 
is not to be confused w^ith the more enig- 
matic essay on * 'Nature," in eight brief 
"books," which appeared in 1836. The later 
essay is based, after a fashion, upon the first, 
but it is more inning in its method. These 
four representative papers are followed by 
the famous Phi Beta Kappa address of 1837 
on "The American Scholar"; an oration 
which Lowell declared to be "an event with- 
out any parallel in our literary annals," and 
^which Holmes characterized as "our intel- 
lectual Declaration of Independence." 

Emerson ^svas thirty-four T^^hen he delivered 
this address upon "The American Scholar." 
His literary productiveness continued un- 
abated for about thirty years longer. After 
1867 he produced little, though his calm life 
was prolonged until 1882, within a few days 
of his eightieth year. All the selections in 
this volume, it will be observed, are chosen 



Editor's Introduction 

from the period of his earher manhood, when 
his thought had a morning freshness and his 
language was that of a ne^w, deHcious poetry. 
None of his later writings give a more per- 
fect display of the essential qualities of his 
genius. 

If Emerson passed logically and systemat- 
ically from one subject to another, and dur- 
ing the elucidation of his themes kept strictly 
to the business in hand, it would be inter- 
esting to summarize the judgments of this 
acute and dispassionate mind upon such 
perennially significant topics as History, 
Self-Reliance, Nature, Spiritual Laws, and 
Scholarship. But Emerson smilingly avoided 
any sequential, formal treatment of his 
themes. To make an abstract of one of his 
essays is as difficult as it is unprofitable. 
He drifts serenely from cape to inlet, from 
island to promontory, surveying some new 
or old domain of thought and experience. 
The reports he brings back to us are ''the 
words we wish to hear,'' but he is not bent, 
after all, upon making a topographical chart 
of sea and shore. Passages from his essay 
on ''History" read like paragraphs belonging 
in "Self-Reliance" or "Nature." Indeed, we 
know that Emerson's essays were pieced to- 
gether out of random entries in his note- 
books, and it is idle to seek for a superficial 
unity for which the author himself never 
cared. 



Editor's Introduction 

It is enough that there is a fundamental 
unity in the great ideaHst's scheme of the 
world. Witness these sentences, chosen from 
each of the essays in this volume : 

''Let it suffice that in the light of these two 
facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that 
Nature is its correlative, history is to be read 
and written."— (''History.") 

"Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. 
Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph 
of principles. "— ( ' 'Self-Reliance. ' ' ) 

"Let a man believe in God, and not in 
names and places and persons." — Spiritual 
Laws.") 

"The world is mind precipitated. ... So 
poor is Nature with all her craft, that 
from the beginning to the end of the universe 
she has but one stuff, — but one stuff with its 
two ends, to serve up all her dream-like 
variety. Compound it how she will, star, 
sand, fire, w^ater, tree, man, it is still one 
stuff, and betrays the same properties." — 
("Nature.") 

"The ancient precept 'Know thyself,' and 
the modern precept 'Study nature,' become at 
last one maxim." — "The American Scholar.") 

Emerson's claim to an enduring place 
among American men of letters is that he 
can say things like these, and say them so 
well. Yet most persons who have once come 
under the spell of that radiant and vivifying 
personality see in Emerson something other 
xi 



Editor's Introduction 

and rarer than a mere man of letters. To 
them he is a ^Triend and helper/' a personal 
force. Some readers think they outgrow 
him, as the transcendental days of youth go 
by ; but the wiser ones keep coming back to 
him to borrow something of his indefeasible 
optimism, his serene courage. This little 
volume ^11 introduce him no doubt, to new- 
readers. They are to be envied. But to the 
greater number of those who turn the pages 
of this book, it w^ill serve as a reminder and 
pledge of an ennobling intellectual compan- 
ionship. Not a few of them, re-reading these 
brave and beautiful essays written more than 
sixty years ago, will murmur to themselves 
those words of Emerson's master which 
sprang to the lips of Faust : 

Bie Geisterwelt ist nicht verschlossen; 
Dein Sinn ist zu, dein Herz ist todt! 
Auf! bade J Scbiiler, unverdrossen, 
Die ird'sche Brust im MorgenrothP' 

Bliss Perry. 



zu 



History 



HISTORY. 

There is one mind common to all indiYidual 
men. Every man is an inlet to the same and 
to all of the same. He that is once admitted 
to the right of reason is made a freeman of 
the whole estate. What Plato has thought, 
he may think; what a saint has felt, he may 
feel ; what at any time has befallen any man, 
he can tmderstand. Who hath access to this 
universal mind is a party to all that is or 
can be done, for this is the only and sover- 
eign agent. 

Of the works of this mind history is the 
record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire 
series of days. Man is explicable by nothing 
less than all his history. Without hurry, 
without rest, the human spirit goes forth 
from the beginning to embody every facult\% 
ever\' thought, every emotion which belongs 
to it, in appropriate events. But the 
thought is alwa\^s prior to the fact; all the 
facts of history preexist in the mind as laws. 
Each law in turn is made by circumstances 
predominant, and the limits of nature give 
power to but one at a time. A man is the 
whole enc\^clop^dia of facts. The creation 
of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and 
Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, 



Emerson 

lie folded already in the first man. Epoch 
after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, 
democracy, are merely the application of his 
manifold spirit to the manifold world. 

This human mind wrote history, and this 
must read it. The Sphinx must solve her 
own riddle. If the whole of history is in one 
man, it is all to be explained from individual 
experience. There is a relation between the 
hours of our life and the centuries of time. 
As the air I breathe is drawn from the great 
repositories of nature, as the light on my 
book is yielded by a star a hundred millions 
of miles distant, as the poise of my body 
depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and 
centripetal forces, so the hours should be in- 
structed by the ages and the ages explained 
by the hours. Of the universal mind each 
individual man is one more incarnation. All 
its properties consist in him. Each new fact 
in his private experience flashes a Hght on 
w^hat great bodies of men have done, and the 
crises of his life refer to national crises. 
Every revolution was first a thought in one 
man's mind, and when the same thought 
occurs to another man, it is the key to that 
era. Every reform was once a private opin- 
ion, and when it shall be a private opinion 
again it will solve the problem of the age. 
The fact narrated must correspond to some- 
thing in me to be credible or intelligible. We, 
as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, 
4 



History 

Turks, priest and king, martyr and execu- 
tioner; must fasten these images to some 
reality in our secret experience, or we shall 
learn nothing rightly. What befell Asdrubal 
or Caesar Borgia is as much an illustration 
of the mind's powers and depravations as 
what has befallen us. Each ne^v law and 
political movement has meaning for you. 
Stand before each of its tablets and sa\^, 
*Under this mask did my Proteus nature hide 
itself This remedies the defect of our too 
great nearness to ourselves. This throws 
our actions into perspective; and as crabs, 
goats, scorpions, the balance and the water- 
pot lose their meanness Avhen hung as signs 
in the zodiac, so I can see my own vices 
without heat in the distant persons of Solo- 
mon, Alcibiades, and Catiline. 

It is the universal nature which gives 
worth to particular men and things. liu- 
man life, as containing this, is mysterious 
and inviolable, and we hedge it round with 
penalties and laws. All laws derive hence 
their ultimate reason; all express more or 
less distinctly some command of this supreme 
illimitable essence. Property also holds of 
the soul, covers great spiritual facts, and 
instinctively we at first hold to it with 
swords and laws and wide and complex com- 
binations. The obscure consciousness of this 
fact is the light of all our day, the claim of 
claims ; the plea for education, for justice, for 
5 



Emerson 

charity; the foundation of friendship and 
love and of the heroism and grandeur which 
belong to acts of self-reHance. It is remark- 
able that involuntarily we always read as 
superior beings. Universal history-, the poets, 
the romancers, do not in their stateliest 
pictures,~in the sacerdotal, the imperial 
palaces, in the triumphs of will or of genius, 
— anyw^here lose our ear, anywhere make us 
feel that we intrude, that this is for better 
men; but rather is it true that in their grand- 
est strokes we feel most at home. All that 
Shakspeare says of the king, ^^onder slip of a 
boy that reads in the corner feels to be true 
of himself. We sympathize in the great mo- 
ments of history, in the great discoveries, the 
great resistances, the great prosperities of 
men; — because there law was enacted, the 
sea w^as searched, the land was found, or the 
blow was struck, for ns, as we ourselves in 
that place would have done or applauded. 

We have the same interest in condition and 
character. We honor the rich because they 
have externally the freedom, power, and 
grace which w^e feel to be proper to man, 
proper to us. So all that is said of the wise 
man b\^ Stoic or Oriental or modern essa^^st, 
describes to each reader his own idea, de- 
scribes his unattained but attainable self. 
All literature writes the character of the wise 
man. Books, monuments, pictures, conver- 
sation, are portraits in which he finds the 
6 



History • 

lineaments he is forming. The silent and the 
eloquent praise him and accost him, and he 
is stimulated -wherever he moves, as by per- 
sonal allusions. A true aspirant therefore 
never needs look for allusions personal and 
laudatory in discourse. He hears the com- 
mendation, not of himself, but, more sweet, 
of that character he seeks, in every word 
that is said concerning character, yea further 
in every fact and circumstance, — in the run- 
nino^ river and the rustlino- corn. Praise is 
looked, homage tendered, love flows, from 
mute nature, from the mountains and the 
lights of the firmament. 

These hints, dropped as it were from sleep 
and night, let us use in broad day. The 
student is to read history actively and not 
passiveh-; to esteem his own life the text, 
and books the commentary. Thus com- 
pelled, the Muse of history will utter oracles^ 
as never to those who do not respect them- 
selves. I have no expectation that any man 
will read history aright who thinks that 
what was done in a remote age, by men 
whose names have resounded far, has any 
deeper sense than what he is doing to-dav. 

The world exists for the education of each 
man. There is no age or state of society or 
mode of action in history to which there is 
not somewhat corresponding in his life. 
Every thing tends in a wonderful manner to 
abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to 
7 



Emerson 

him. He should see that he can Hve all his- 
tory in his own person. He must sit solidly 
at home, and not suffer himself to be bullied 
by kings or empires, but know that he is 
greater than all the geography and all the 
government of the world ; he must transfer 
the point of view from which histor\^ is com- 
monly read, from Rome and Athens and Lon- 
don, to himself, and not deny his conviction 
that he is the court, and if England or 
Egypt have any thing to sa\^ to him he Avill 
try the case; if not, let them forever be 
silent. He must attain and maintain that 
lofty sight where facts yield their secret 
sense, and poetry and annals are alike. The 
instinct of the mind, the purpose of nature, 
betrays itself in the use we make of the sig- 
nal narrations of history. Time dissipates to 
shining ether the solid angularity of facts. 
No anchor, no cable, no fences avail to keep 
a fact a fact. Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Pales- 
tine, and even early Rome are passing al- 
read\^ into fiction. The Garden of Eden, the 
sun standing still in Gideon, is poetry thence- 
forward to all nations. Who cares what the 
fact was, when we have made a constella- 
tion of it to hang in heaven an immortal 
sign? London and Paris and New York 
must go the same way. "What is history,'' 
said Napoleon, ''but a fable agreed upon?'' 
This life of ours is stuck round with Egypt, 
Greece, Gaul, England, War, Colonization, 
8 



History 

Church, Court and Commerce, as with so 
many flowers and wild ornaments grave and 
gay. I will not make more account of them. 
I believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, Asia, 
Italy, Spain, and the Islands, — the genius 
and creative principle of each and of all eras, 
in my own mind. 

We are always coming up with the em- 
phatic facts of history in our private expe- 
rience and verifying them here. All history 
becomes subjective; in other words there is 
properly no history, only biography. Every 
mind must know the whole lesson for itself, — 
must go over the whole ground. What it 
does not see, what it does not live, it will 
not know. What the former age has epito- 
mized into a formula or rule for manipular 
convenience, it wU lose all the good of verify- 
ing for itself, by means of the wall of that 
rule. Somewhere, sometime, it will demand 
and find compensation for that loss, by doing 
the work itself. Ferguson discovered man\" 
things in astronomy which had long been 
known. The better for him. 

History must be this or it is nothing. 
Every law v^^hich the state enacts indicates a 
fact in human nature ; that is all. We must 
in ourselves see the necessar}^ reason of every 
fact, — see how it could and must be. So 
stand before ever^^ public and private work ; 
before an oration of Burke, before a victory 
of Napoleon, before a martj^rdom of Sir 
9 



Emerson 

Thomas More, of Sidne^^, of Marmaduke 
Robinson; before a French Reign of Terror, 
and a Salem hanging of Avitches ; before a 
fanatic revival and the Animal Magnetism 
in Paris, or in Providence. We assume that 
we tinder like influence should be alike af- 
fected, and should achieve the like; and we 
aim to master intellectually the steps and 
reach the same height or the same degrada- 
tion that our fellow, our prox}^ has done. 

All inquiry into antiquity, all curiosity re- 
specting the Pyramids, the excavated cities, 
Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico, Mem- 
phis, — is the desire to do awa\" this w41d, 
savage, and preposterous There or Then, and 
introduce in its place the Here and the No^w. 
Belzoni digs and measures in the mummy- 
pits and pyramids of Thebes until he can see 
the end of the difference betw^een the mon- 
strous work and himself. When he has satis- 
fied himself, in general and in detail, that it 
w^as made by such a person as he, so armed 
and so motived, and to ends to which he 
himself should also have worked, the prob- 
lem is solved; his thought lives along the 
whole line of temples and sphinxes and cata- 
combs, passes through them all with satis- 
faction, and they live again to the mind, or 
are now. 

A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done 
by us and not done by us. Sureh^ it was by 
man, but we find it not in our man. But 
10 



History 

w^e apph" ourselves to the history of its pro- 
duction. We put ourselves into the place and 
state of the builder. We remember the forest- 
dwellers, the first temples, the adherence to 
the first t\'pe, and the decoration of it as 
the v^^ealth of the nation increased ; the value 
which is given to wood by carving led to the 
carving over the whole mountain of stone of 
a cathedral. When we have gone through 
this process, and added thereto the Catholic 
Church, its cross, its music, its processions, 
its Saints' days and image-worship, we have 
as it were been the man that made the min- 
ister; we have seen how it could and must 
be. We have the sufiicient reason. 

The difierence betv^^een men is in their prin- 
ciple of association. Some mQn classify ob- 
jects by color and size and other accidents of 
appearance; others by intrinsic likeness, or 
by the relation of cause and effect. The 
progress of the intellect is to the clearer 
vision of causes, v^^hich neglects surface dif- 
ferences. To the poet, to the philosopher, to 
the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, 
all events profitable, all days holy, all men 
divine. For the e\^e is fastened on the 
life, and slights the circumstance. Every 
chemical substance, every plant, every animal 
in its growth, teaches the unity of cause, the 
variety of appearance. 

Upborne and surrounded as \Ye are by this 
all-creating nature, soft and fluid as a cloud 
11 



Emerson 

or the air, why should we be such hard ped- 
ants, and magnify a few forms? Wh}^ should 
w^e make account of time, or of magnitude, 
or of figure? The soul know^s them not, and 
genius, obeying its law, knows how to play 
with them as a young child plays with gray- 
beards and in churches. Genius studies the 
causal thought, and far back in the womb of 
things sees the rays parting from one orb, 
that diverge, ere they fall, by infinite diam- 
eters. Genius watches the monad through 
all his masks as he performs the metempsy- 
chosis of nature. Genius detects through the 
fly, through the caterpillar, through the 
grub, through the egg^ the constant indi- 
vidual; through countless individuals the 
fixed species ; through many species the 
genus ; through all genera the steadfast 
type ; through all the kingdoms of organized 
life the eternal unity. Nature is a mutable 
cloud which is always and never the same. 
She casts the same thought into troops of 
forms, as a poet makes twenty fables with 
one moral. Through the bruteness and 
toughness of matter, a subtle spirit bends all 
things to its ow^n will. The adamant 
streams into soft but precise form before it, 
and \vhilst I look at it its outline and tex- 
ture are changed again. Nothing is so fleet- 
ing as form ; yet never does it quite deny 
itself In man we still trace the remains or 
hints of all that we esteem badges of servi- 
12 



History 

tnde in tlie lower races ; yet in him thev en- 
hance his nobleness and grace; as lo, in 
^sch\dtis, transformed to a cow, offends the 
imagination ; but how changed when as Isis 
in Egypt she meets Osiris- Jove, a beautiful 
woman with nothing of the metamorphosis 
left but the lunar horns as the splendid orna- 
ment of her brows ! 

The identity of histor\^ is equally intrinsic, 
the diversit}" equally obvious. There is, at 
the surface, infinite variety of things ; at the 
centre there is simplicity of cause. How 
many are the acts of one man in which we 
recognize the same character! Observe the 
sources of our information in respect to the 
Greek Genius. We have the civil history of 
that people, as Herodotus, Thucydides, Xeno- 
phon, and Plutarch have given it ; a very 
sufiicient account of what manner of persons 
they were and what they did. We have the 
same national mind expressed for us again in 
their literature^ in epic and h^ric poems, 
drama, and philosophy; a ver\' complete 
form. Then we have it once more in their 
architecture, a beauty as of temperance itself, 
limited to the straight line and the square, — 
a builded geometr^^ Then we have it once 
again in sculpture ^ the "tongue on the bal- 
ance of expression, " a multitude of forms in 
the utmost freedom of action and never 
transgressing the ideal serenit\^; like votaries 
performing some religious dance before the 
13 



Emerson 

gods, and, though in convulsive pain or 
mortal combat, never daring to break the 
figure and decorum of their dance. Thus of 
the genius of one remarkable people we have 
a fourfold representation: and to the senses 
what more unlike than an ode of Pindar, a 
marble centaur, the peristyle of the Parthe- 
non, and the last actions of Phocion? 

Every one must have observed faces and 
forms v^^hich, v^4thout any resembling feature, 
m^ \e a like impression on the beholder. A 
particular picture or copy of verses, if it do 
not awaken the same train of images, will 
yet superinduce the same sentiment as some 
wild mountain v^^alk, although the resem- 
blance is nowise obvious to the senses, but 
is occult and out of the reach of the under- 
standing. Nature is an endless combination 
and repetition of a very few laws. She hums 
the old well-known air through innumerable 
variations. 

Nature is full of a sublime famih^ likeness 
throughout her v^^orks, and delights in star- 
tling us \Yith resemblances in the most unex- 
pected quarters. I have seen the head of an 
old sachem of the forest which at once re- 
minded the e\^e of a bald mountain summit, 
and the furrows of the brow suggested the 
strata of the rock. There are men whose 
manners have the same essential splendor as 
the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes 
of the Parthenon and the remains of the 
14 



History 

earliest Greek art. And there are composi- 
tions of the same strain to be found in the 
books of all ages. What is Guido's Rospi- 
gliosi Aurora but a morning thought, as the 
horses in it are only a morning cloud? If 
an\^ one will but take pains to observe the 
variety of actions to which he is equally in- 
clined in certain moods of mind, and those 
to which he is averse, he will see how deep 
is the chain of affinity. 

A painter told me that nobody could draw 
a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; 
or draw^ a child by studying the outlines of 
its form mereh^, — but, by v^^atching for a 
time his motions and plays, the painter 
enters into his nature and can then draw 
him at Avill in every attitude. So Roos 
''entered into the inmost nature of a sheep." 
I knew a draughtsman employed in a public 
survey w^ho found that he could not sketch 
the rocks until their geological structure was 
first explained to him. In a certain state of 
thought is the common origin of very diverse 
works. It is the spirit and not the fact that 
is identical. B\" a deeper apprehension, and 
not primarily by a painful acquisition of 
many manual skills, the artist attains the 
power of awakening other souls to a given 
activity. 

It has been said that "common souls pay 
with v^hat they do, nobler souls with that 
which they are." And why? Because a pro- 
15 



Emerson 

found nature awakens in us by its actions 
and words, bj its very looks and manners, 
the same power and beauty that a gallery of 
sculpture or of pictures addresses. 

Civil and natural history, the history of 
art and of literature, must be explained from 
individual history, or must remain words. 
There is nothing but is related to us, nothing 
that does not interest us, — kingdom, college, 
tree, horse, or iron shoe, — the roots of all 
things are in man. Santa Croce and the 
Dome of St. Peter's are lame copies after a 
divine model. Strasburg Cathedral is a ma- 
terial counterpart of the soul of Erwin of 
Steinbach. The true poem is the poet's 
mind; the true ship is the ship-builder. In 
the man, could we lay him open, we should 
see the reason for the last flourish and ten- 
dril of his work ; as every spine and tint in 
the sea-shell preexist in the secreting organs 
of the fish. The v^hole of heraldry and of 
chivalr}^ is in courtesy. A man of fine man- 
ners shall pronounce your name with all the 
ornament that titles of nobility could ever 
add. 

The trivial experience of every day is al- 
ways verifying some old prediction to us and 
converting into things the words and signs 
which we had heard and seen without heed. 
A lady w4th Avhom I was riding in the forest 
said to me that the woods alwa3^s seemed to 
her to waity as if the genii who inhabit them 
16 



History 

suspended their deeds until the wayfarer had 
passed onward ; a thought which poetry has 
celebrated in the dance of the fairies, which 
breaks off on the approach of human feet. 
The man who has seen the rising moon 
break out of the clouds at midnight, has 
been present like an archangel at the crea- 
tion of light and of the world. I remember 
one summer day in the fields my companion 
pointed out to me a broad cloud, which 
might extend a quarter of a mile parallel to 
the horizon, quite accurately in the form of a 
cherub as painted over churches, — a round 
block in the centre, which it was easy to 
animate with eyes and mouth, supported on 
either side by wide-stretched symmetrical 
wings. What appears once in the atmos- 
phere may appear often, and it was un- 
doubtedly the archet\^pe of that familiar 
ornament. I have seen in the sky a chain of 
summer lightning which at once showed to 
me that the Greeks drew from nature when 
they painted the thunderbolt in the hand of 
Jove. I have seen a snow-drift along the 
sides of the stone wall vrhich obviously gave 
the idea of the common architectural scroll 
to abut a tower. 

By surrounding ourselves with the original 
circumstances \ve invent anew the orders and 
the ornaments of architecture, as we see how 
each people mereh^ decorated its primitive 
abodes. The Doric temple preserves the sem- 
2 17 



Emerson 

blance of the wooden cabin in which the 
Dorian dwelt. The Chinese pagoda is plainly 
a Tartar tent. The Indian and Egyptian 
temples still betray the motinds and subter- 
ranean houses of their forefathers. "The 
custom of making houses and tombs in the 
living rock/' says Heeren in his Researches 
on the Ethiopians, * 'determined very natu- 
rally the principal character of the Nubian 
Egyptian architecture to the colossal form 
which it assumed. In these caverns, already 
prepared by nature, the eye was accustomed 
to d^vell on huge shapes and masses, so that 
when art came to the assistance of nature it 
could not move on a small scale without 
degrading itself What would statues of the 
usual size, or neat porches and v^angs have 
been, associated with those gigantic halls be- 
fore which only Colossi could sit as watch- 
men or lean on the pillars of the interior?" 

The Gothic church plainly originated in a 
rude adaptation of the forest trees, with all 
their boughs, to a festal or solemn arcade; 
as the bands about the cleft pillars still indi- 
cate the green withes that tied them. No 
one can walk in a road cut through pine 
woods, without being struck with the archi- 
tectural appearance of the grove, especially 
in winter, when the barrenness of all other 
trees show^s the low arch of the Saxons. In 
the woods in a \vinter afternoon one will see 
as readily the origin of the stained glass win- 
18 



History 

dow, with which the Gothic cathedrals are 
adorned, in the colors of the western skj seen 
through the bare and crossing branches of 
the forest. Nor can any lover of nature enter 
the old piles of Oxford and the English 
cathedrals, without feeling that the forest 
overpowered the mind of the builder, and 
that his chisel, his saw and plane still re- 
produced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its 
locust, elm, oak, pine, fir and spruce. 

The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in 
stone subdued by the insatiable demand of 
harmony in man. The mountain of granite 
blooms , into an eternal flower, with the 
lightness and delicate finish as well as the 
aerial proportions and perspective of vegeta- 
ble beauty. 

In like manner all public facts are to be 
individualized, all private facts are to be 
generalized. Then at once History becomes 
fluid and true, and Biography deep and 
sublime. As the Persian imitated in the 
slender shafts and capitals of his architecture 
the stem and flower of the lotus and palm, 
so the Persian court in its magnificent era 
never gave over the nomadism of its bar- 
barous tribes, but travelled from Ecbatana, 
where the spring was spent, to Susa in sum- 
mer and to Babylon for the winter. 

In the early history of Asia and Africa, 
Nomadism and Agriculture are the two an- 
tagonist facts. The geography of Asia and 
19 



Emerson 

of Africa necessitated a nomadic life. But 
the nomads were the terror of all those 
whom the soil or the advantages of a mar- 
ket had induced to build towns. Agriculture 
therefore was a religious injunction, because 
of the perils of the state from nomadism. 
And in these late and civil countries of Eng- 
land and America these propensities still 
fight out the old battle, in the nation and in 
the individual. The nomads of Africa were 
constrained to wander, b}^ the attacks of the 
gad-fly, which drives the cattle mad, and so 
compels the tribe to emigrate in the rainy 
season and to drive off the cattle to the 
higher sandy regions. The nomads of Asia 
follow the pasturage from month to month. 
In America and Europe the nomadism is of 
trade and curiosity; a progress, certainly, 
from the gad-fly of Astaboras to the Anglo 
and Italo-mania of Boston Bay. Sacred 
cities, to which a periodical religious pil- 
grimage was enjoined, or stringent laws and 
customs tending to invigorate the national 
bond, were the check on the old rovers ; and 
the cumulative values of long residence are 
the restraints on the itinerancy of the present 
day. The antagonism of the two tendencies 
is not less active in individuals, as the loA^e of 
adventure or the love of repose happens to 
predominate. A man of rude health and 
flowing spirits has the* faculty- of rapid 
domestication, lives in his wagon and roams 
20 



History 

through all latitudes as easih^ as a Calmuc. 
At sea, or in the forest, or in the snow, he 
sleeps as warm, dines with as good appe- 
tite, and associates as happily as beside his 
o^vn chimne\^s. Or perhaps his facility is deeper 
seated, in the increased range of his faculties 
of observation, which yield him points of 
interest wherever fresh objects meet his eyes. 
The pastoral nations were needy and hungrj- 
to desperation ; and this intellectual nomad- 
ism, in its excess, bankrupts the mind 
through the dissipation of povrer on a mis- 
cellany of objects. The home-keeping wat, on 
the other hand, is that continence or content 
v^^hich finds all the elements of life in its own 
soil; and which has its own perils of monot- 
ony and deterioration, if not stimulated by 
foreign infusions. 

Every thing the individual sees without 
him corresponds to his states of mind, and 
every thing is in turn intelligible to him, as 
his onward thinking leads him into the 
truth to which that fact or series belongs. 

The primeval world, — the Fore-World, as 
the Germans say, — I can dive to it in myself 
as well as grope for it with researching 
fingers in catacombs, libraries, and the 
broken reliefs and torsos of ruined villas. 

What is the foundation of that interest all 

men feel in Greek history, letters, art and 

poetry, in all its periods from the Heroic or 

Homeric age down to the domestic life of the 

21 



Emerson 

Athenians and Spartans, four or five cen- 
turies later? What but this, that eTer\^ man 
passes personally through a Grecian period. 
The Grecian state is the era of the bodily 
nature, the perfection of the senses, — of the 
spiritual nature unfolded in strict unit}" with 
the body. In it existed those human forms 
which supplied the sculptor with his models 
of Hercules, Phoebus, and Jove ; not like the 
forms abounding in the streets of modern 
cities, wherein the face is a confused blur of 
features, but comjDosed of incorrupt, sharply 
defined and symmetrical features, whose eye- 
sockets are so formed that it would be im- 
possible for such eyes to squint and take 
furtive glances on this side and on that, but 
they must turn the whole head. The man- 
ners of that period are plain and fierce. The 
reverence exhibited is for jDcrsonal quali- 
ties; courage, address, self-command, justice, 
strength, swiftness, a loud voice, a broad 
chest. Luxury and elegance are not known. 
A sparse population and want make every 
man his own valet, cook, butcher and sol- 
dier, and the habit of supplying his own 
needs educates the bod}^ to Avonderful per- 
formances. Such are the Agamemnon and 
Diomed of Homer, and not far difiTerent is the 
picture Xenophon gives of himself and his 
compatriots in the Retreat of the Ten Thou- 
sand. ''After the army had crossed the river 
Teleboas in Armenia, there fell much snow, 
22 



History 

and the troops lav miserably on the ground 
covered with it. But Xenophon arose naked, 
and taking an axe, began to split wood; 
whereupon others rose and did the like." 
Throughout his army exists a boundless 
liberty of speech. They quarrel for plunder, 
they \vrangle w4th the generals on each new 
order, and Xenophon is as sharp-tongued as 
an}^ and sharper-tongued than most, and So 
gives as good as he gets. Who does not see 
that this is a gang of great boys, with such 
a code of honor and such lax discipline as 
great boys have? 

The costly charm of the ancient tragedy, 
and indeed of all the old literature, is that 
the persons speak simply, — speak as persons 
w^ho have great good sense without knowing 
it, before yet the reflective habit has become 
the predominant habit of the mind. Our 
admiration of the antique is not admiration 
of the old, but of the natural. The Greeks 
are^ not reflective, but perfect in their senses 
and in their health, with the finest ph^^sical 
organization in the world. Adults acted 
with the simplicity and grace of children. 
They made vases, tragedies and statues, 
such as healthy senses should, — that is, in 
good taste. Such things have continued to 
be made in all ages, and are now, wherever 
a healthy physique exists; but, as a class, 
from their superior organization, they have 
surpassed all. They combine the energy of 
23 



Emerson 

manhood with the engaging unconsciousness 
of childhood. The attraction of these man- 
ners is that they belong to man, and are 
known to every man in virtue of his being 
once a child; besides that there are always 
individuals Avho retain these characteristics. 
A person of childlike genius and inborn 
energy is still a Greek, and revives our love 
of the Muse of Hellas. I admire the love of 
nature in the Philoctetes. In reading those 
fine apostrophes to sleep, to the stars, rocks, 
mountains and waves, I feel time passing 
away as an ebbing sea. I feel the eternity of 
man, the identity of his thought. The Greek 
had it seems the same fellow-beings as I. 
The sun and moon, water and fire, met his 
heart precisely as they meet mine. Then the 
vaunted distinction between Greek and Eng- 
lish, between Classic and Romantic schools, 
seems superficial and pedantic. When a 
thought of Plato becomes a thought to me, 
— when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar 
fires mine, time is no more. When I feel that 
we tw^o meet in a perception, that our two 
soulf> are tinged v^ith the same hue, and do 
as it were run into one, why should I m_eas- 
ure degrees of latitude, why should I count 
Egyptian years? 

The student interprets the age of chivalry 

by his own age of chivalry, and the da3^s of 

maritime adventure and circumnavigation 

by quite parallel miniature experiences of his 

24 



History 

own. To the sacred history of the world he 
has the same key. When the voice of a 
prophet out of the deeps of antiquity merely 
echoes to him a sentiment of his infancy, a 
prayer of his ^^outh, he then pierces to the 
truth through all the confusion of tradition 
and the caricature of institutions. 

Rare, extravagant Sjjirits come by us at 
intervals, who disclose to us new facts in 
nature. I see that men of God have from 
time to time walked among men and made 
their commission felt in the heart and soul of 
the commonest hearer. Hence evidently the 
tripod, the priest, the priestess inspired by 
the divine afflatus. 

Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual 
people. They cannot unite him to history, 
or reconcile him with themselves. As they 
come to revere their intuitions and aspire to 
live holily, their own pietj- explains every 
fact, every w^ord. 

How^ easily these old worships of Moses, of 
Zoroaster, of Menu, of Socrates, domesticate 
themselves in the mind. I cannot find any 
antiquity in them. They are mine as much 
as theirs. 

I have seen the first monks and anchorets, 
without crossing seas or centuries. More 
than once some individual has appeared to 
me with such negligence of labor and such 
commanding contemplation, a haught\^ bene- 
ficiary begging in the name of God, as made 
25 



Emerson 

good to the nineteenth century Simeon the 
Stylite, the Thebais, and the first Capuchins. 

The priestcraft of the East and West, of the 
Magian, Brahmin, Druid, and Inca, is ex- 
pounded in the individual's private life. The 
cramping influence of a hard formalist on a 
joung child, in repressing his spirits and 
courage, paralyzing the understanding, and 
that without producing indignation, but 
only fear and obedience, and even much 
sympathy with the tyrann^^, — is a familiar 
fact, explained to the child when he becomes 
a man, only by seeing that the oppressor of 
his youth is himself a child tyrannized over 
by those names and words and forms of 
whose influence he was merely the organ to 
the youth. The fact teaches him how Belus 
was worshipped and how the Pyramids were 
built, better than the discovery by Cham- 
pollion of the names of all the workmen and 
the cost of ever\'' tile. He finds Assyria and 
the Mounds of Cholula at his door, and him- 
self has laid the courses. 

Again, in that protest which each con- 
siderate person makes against the supersti- 
tion of his times, he repeats step for step the 
part of old reformers, and in the search after 
truth finds, like them, new perils to virtue. 
He learns again what moral vigor is needed 
to supply the girdle of a superstition. A 
great licentiousness treads on the heels of a 
reformation. How many times in the his- 
26 



History 

tory of the world has the Luther of the day 
had to lament the decay of piet\^ in his own 
household! * 'Doctor," said his wife to Mar- 
tin Luther, one day, ''how is it that whilst 
subject to papacy we prayed so often and 
with such fervor, whilst now we pray with 
the utmost coldness and very seldom?" 

The advancing man discovers how deep a 
property he has in literature, —in all fable as 
well as in all history. He finds that the poet 
was no odd fellow^ who described strange 
and impossible situations, but that universal 
man \srrote by his pen a confession true for 
one and true for all. His own secret biogra- 
phy he finds in lines wonderfully intelligible 
to him, dotted dovrn before he was born. 
One after another he comes up in his private 
adventures with every fable of ^sop, of 
Homer, of Hafiz, of Ariosto, of Chaucer, of 
Scott, and verifies them with his OAvn head 
and hands. 

The beautiful fables of the Greeks, being 
proper creations of the imagination and not 
of the fancy, are universal verities. What a 
range of meanings and what perpetual per- 
tinence has the story of Prometheus! Be- 
side its primary value as the first chapter of 
the history of Europe, (the mythology thinly 
veiling authentic facts, the invention of the 
mechanic arts and the migration of colonies,) 
it gives the history of religion, with some 
closeness to the faith of later ages. Prome- 
, 27 



Emerson 

theus is the Jesus of the old mythology. He 
is the friend of man ; stands between the tm- 
just ''justice" of the Eternal Father and the 
race of mortals, and readily suffers all things 
on their account. But where it departs from 
the Calvinistic Christianity and exhibits him 
as ±he defier of Jove, it represents a state of 
mind which readily appears wherever the 
doctrine of Theism is taught in a crude, 
objective forni, and which seems the self- 
defence of man against this untruth, namely 
a discontent with the believed fact that a 
God exists, and a feeling that the obligation 
of reverence is onerous. It would steal if it 
could the fire of the Creator, and live apart 
from him and independent of him. The 
Prometheus Yinctus is the romance of skepti- 
cism. Not less true to all time are the details 
of that stately apologue. Apollo kept the 
flocks of Admetus, said the poets. When the 
gods come among men, they are not known. 
Jesus was not; Socrates and Shakspeare 
were not. Antaeus was suffocated by the 
gripe of Hercules, but every time he touched 
his mother earth his strength \vas renewed. 
Man is the broken giant, and in all his weak- 
ness both his bod}^ and his mind are invig- 
orated by habits of conversation with na- 
ture. The power of music, the power of 
poetry-, to unfix and as it were clap wings to 
solid nature, interprets the riddle of Orpheus. 
The philosophical perception of identity 
28 



History 

throtigh endless mutations of form makes 
him know the Proteus. What else am I who 
laughed or wept yesterda}^, who slept last 
night like a corpse, and this morning stood 
and ran? And what see I on any side but 
the transmigrations of Proteus? I can sj^m- 
bolize my thought b}^ using the name of 
any creature, of any fact, because every 
creature is man agent, or patient. Tantalus 
is but a name for you and me. Tantalus 
means the impossibility- of drinking the 
waters of thought which are always gleam- 
ing and waving within sight of the soul. 
The transmigration of souls is no fable. I 
w^ould it were ; but men and women are only 
half human. Every animal of the barn-yard, 
the field and the forest, of the earth and of 
the waters that are under the earth, has con- 
trived to get a footing and to leave the 
print of its features and form in some one or 
other of these upright, heaven-facing speak- 
ers. Ah! brother, stop the ebb of thy soul, — 
ebbing downward into the forms into whose 
habits thou hast now for many years slid. 
As near and proper to us is also that old 
fable of the Sphinx, who was said to sit in 
the road-side and put riddles to every pas- 
senger. If the man could not ansv^er, she 
swallowed him alive. If he could solve the 
riddle, the Sphinx was slain. What is our 
life but an endless flight of winged facts or 
events? In splendid variety these changes 
29 



Emerson 

come, all putting questions to the human 
spirit. Those men who cannot answer by a 
superior ^dsdom these facts or questions of 
time, serve them. Facts encumber them, 
tyrannize over them, and make the men of 
routine, the men of sense, in whom a Hteral 
obedience to facts has extinguished every 
spark of that Hght b}^ which man is truly 
man. But if the man is true to his better 
instincts or sentiments, and refuses the do- 
minion of facts, as one that comes of a 
higher race; remains fast by the soul and 
sees the principle, then the facts fall aptly 
and supple into their places ; the\^ know their 
master, and the meanest of them glorifies 
him. 

See in Goethe's Helena the same desire that 
every word should be a thing. These figures, 
he would say, these Chirons, Griffins, Phor- 
kyas, Helen and Leda, are somewhat, and do 
exert a specific influence on the mind. So far 
then are they eternal entities, as real to-day 
as in the first Olympiad. Much revolving 
them he writes out freely his humor, and 
gives them body to his own imagination. 
And although that poem be as vague and 
fantastic as a dream, yet is it much more 
attractive than the more regular dramatic 
pieces of the same author, for the reason 
that it operates a wonderful relief to the 
mind from the routine of customary images, 
' — awakens the reader's invention and fancy 
30 



History 

bv the wild freedom of the design, and bv the 
unceasing succession of brisk shocks of sur- 
prise. 

The universal nature, too strong for the 
pettv nature of the bard, sits on his neck 
and writes through his hand ; so that when 
he seems to vent a mere caprice and wild 
romance, the issue is an exact allegor\^ 
Hence Plato said that ''poets utter great and 
wise things which thev do not themselves 
understand." All the fictions of the Middle 
Age explain themselves as a masked or froUc 
expression of that which in grave earnest the 
mind of that period toiled to achieve. Magic 
ajid all that is ascribed to it is a deep pre- 
sentiment of the powers of science. The 
shoes of swiftness, the sword of sharpness, 
the power of subduing the elements, of using 
the secret virtues of minerals, of understand- 
ing the voices of birds, are the obscure efforts 
of the mind in a right direction. The pre- 
ternatural prowess of the hero, the gift of 
perpetual youth, and the like, are alike the 
endeavor of the human spirit ''to bend the 
shows of things to the desires of the mind." 

In Perceforest and Amadis de Gaul a gar- 
land and a rose bloom on the head of her 
who is faithful, and fade on the brow of the 
inconstant. In the story of the Boy and the 
Mantle even a mature reader may be sur- 
prised with a glow of virtuous pleasure at 
the triumph of the gentle Genelas; and in- 
31 



Emerson 

deed all the postulates of elfin annals, — that 
the fairies do not like to be named ; that their 
gifts are capricious and not to be trusted; 
that Avho seeks a treasure must not speak; 
and the like, — I find true in Concord, how- 
ever they might be in Corn\vall or Bretagne. 
Is it otherwise in the newest romance? I 
read the Bride of Lammermoor. Sir William 
Ashton is a mask for a vulgar temptation, 
Ravenswood Castle a fine name for proud 
poverty, and the foreign mission of state 
only a Bunyan disguise for honest industr3\ 
We may all shoot a wald bull that would 
toss the good and beautiful, by fighting 
do^vn the unjust and sensual. Lucy Ashton 
is another name for fidelity, \vhich is al^srays 
beautiful and ahvays liable to calamity in 
this world. 

But along with the civil and metaphysical 
history of man, another history goes daily 
forward, — that of the external world, — in 
which he is not less strictly implicated. He 
is the compend of time ; he is also the cor- 
relative of nature. His power consists in the 
multitude of his afiinities, in the fact that 
his life is intertwined with the whole chain 
of organic and inorganic being. In old Rome 
the public roads beginning at the Forum 
proceeded north, south, east, Avest, to the 
centre of every province of the empire, mak- 
ing each market-town of Persia, Spain and 
32 



History 

Britain pervious to the soldiers of the cap- 
ital: so out of the human heart go as it 
were highways to the heart of every object 
in nature, to reduce it under the dominion of 
man. A man is a bundle of relations, a 
knot of roots, \vhose flower and fruitage is 
the world. His faculties refer to natures out 
of him and predict the world he is to inhabit, 
as the fins of the fish foreshoAv that water 
exists, or the wings of an eagle in the egg 
presuppose air. He cannot live without a 
world. Put Napoleon in an island prison, 
let his faculties find no men to act on, no 
Alps to climb, no stake to play for, and 
he would beat the air, and appear stupid. 
Transport him to large countries, dense pop- 
ulation, complex interests and antagonist 
power, and you shall see that the man 
Napoleon, bounded that is by such a profile 
and outline, is not the virtual Napoleon. 
This is but Talbot's shadow; — 

''His substance is not here. 
For \vhat you see is but the smallest part 
And least proportion of humanity ; 
But w^ere the w^hole frame here, 
It is of such a spacious, lofty pitch, 
Your roof were not sufficient to contain it." 

Henry VI. 

Columbus needs a planet to shape his 

course upon. Newton and Laplace need 

m\^riads of age and thick-strewn celestial 

areas. One may say a gravitating solar 

3 33 



Emerson 

system is already projDhesied in the nature of 
Newton's mind. Not less does the brain of 
Davy or of Gay-Lussac, from childhood ex- 
ploring the affinities and rejDulsions of joarti- 
cles, anticipate the laws of organization. 
Does not the eye of the human embrvo pre- 
dict the light? the ear of Handel predict the 
witchcraft of harmonic sound? Do not the 
constructive fingers of Watt, Fulton, Whitte- 
more, Arkwright, predict the fusible, hard, 
and temperable texture of metals, the proper- 
ties of stone, water, and w^ood? Do not the 
lovely attributes of the maiden child predict 
the refinements and decorations of civil 
society? Here also we are reminded of the 
action of man on man. A mind might pon- 
der its thoughts for ages and not gain so 
much self-knowledge as the passion of love 
shall teach it in a da^^ Who knows himself 
before he has been thrilled with indignation 
at an outrage, or has heard an eloquent 
tongue, or has shared the throb of thousands 
in a national exultation or alarm? No man 
can antedate his experience, or guess Avhat 
faculty or feeling a new object shall unlock, 
any more than he can draw to-day the face 
of a person whom he shall see to-morrow for 
the first time. 

I will not now go behind the general 

statement to explore the reason of this cor- 

respondenc\^ Let it suffice that in the light 

of these two facts, namely, that the mind is 

34 



History 

One, and that nature is its correlative, his- 
tory is to be read and written. 

Thus in all ways does the soul concentrate 
and reproduce its treasures for each pupil. 
He too shall pass through the whole cycle of 
.experience. He shall collect into a focus the 
rays of nature. History no longer shall be a 
dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every 
just and wise man. You shall not tell me by 
languages and titles a catalogue of the vol- 
umes you have read. You shall make me 
feel what periods you have lived. A man 
shall be the Temple of Fame. He shall walk, 
as the poets have described that goddess, in 
a robe painted all over with wonderful events 
and experiences ; — his own form and features 
by their exalted intelligence shall be that 
variegated vest. I shall find in him the 
Foreworld; in his childhood the Age of Gold, 
the Apples of Knowledge, the Argonautic 
Expedition, the calling of Abraham, the 
building of the Temple, the Advent of Christ, 
Dark Ages, the Revival of Letters, the Refor- 
mation, the discovery of new lands, the open- 
ing of new sciences and new regions in man. 
He shall be the priest of Pan, and bring with 
him into humble cottages the blessing of the 
morning stars, and all the recorded benefits 
of heaven and earth. 

Is there somewhat overweening in this 
claim? Then I reject all I have written, for 
what is the use of pretending to know what 
35 



Emerson 

\^e know not? But it is the fault of our 
rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one 
fact without seeming to belie some other. I 
hols our actual knowledge very cheap. Hear 
the rats in the wall, see the lizard on the 
fence, the fungus under foot, the lichen on the 
log. What do I know- sympathetically, 
morally, of either of these worlds of life? As 
old as the Caucasian man, — perhaps older, — 
these creatures have kept their counsel be- 
side him, and there is no record of any Avord 
or sign that has passed from one to the 
other. What connection do the books show 
between the fifty or sixty chemical elements 
and the historical eras? Nay, what does his- 
tory yet record of the metaphysical annals of 
man? What light does it shed on those 
mysteries which we hide under the names 
Death and Immortality? Yet every history 
should be written in a wisdom w^hich divined 
the range of our affinities and looked at facts 
as symbols. I am ashamed to see what a 
shallow village tale our so-called History is. 
How many times Ave must say Rome, and 
Paris, and Constantinople! What does 
Rome know of rat and lizard? What are 
Olympiads and Consulates to these neighbor- 
ing systems of beings? Nay, what food or 
experience or succor have they for the Esqui- 
maux seal-hunter, for the Kanaka in his 
canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the 
porter? 

36 



History 

Broader and deeper we must write our 
annals, — from an ethical reformation, from 
an influx of the ever new, ever sanative con- 
science, — if we would trulier express our cen- 
tral and wide-related nature, instead of this 
old chronology of selfishness and pride to 
w^hich we have too long lent our eyes. Al- 
ready that day exists for us, shines in on us 
at una\vares, but the path of science and of 
letters is not the v^ay into nature. The 
idiot, the Indian, the child and unschooled 
farmer^ s boy stand nearer to the light by 
which nature is to be read, than the dissector 
or the antiquary. 



37 



Self-Reliance 



39 



SELF-RELIANCE. 

I READ the other day some verses written 
b}^ an eminent painter which were original 
and not conventional. The soul always 
hears an admonition in such lines, let the 
subject be what it may. The sentiment they 
instil is of more value than any thought 
they may contain. To believe your own 
thought, to believe that what is true for you 
in your private heart is true for all men, — 
that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, 
and it shall be the universal sense; for the 
utmost in due time becomes the outmost, 
and our first thought is rendered back to us 
by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. 
Familiar as the voice of the mind is to 
each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, 
Plato and Milton is that they set at naught 
books and traditions, and spoke not what 
men, but what they thought. A man should 
learn to detect and watch that gleam of 
light which flashes across his mind from 
within, more than the lustre of the firma- 
ment of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses 
without notice his thought, because it is 
his. In every work of genius we recognize 
our own rejected thoughts; they come back 
41 



Emerson 

to us with a certain alienated majesty. 
Great works of art have no more affecting 
lesson for ns than this. Thev teach us to 
abide by our spontaneous impression Avith 
good-humored inflexibility then most when 
the whole cry of voices is on the other side. 
Else to-morrow a stranger will say with 
masterly good sense precisely what we have 
thought and felt all the time, and Ave shall be 
forced to take Avith shame our own opinion 
from another. 

There is a time in every man's education 
Avhen he arrives at the conviction that envy 
is ignorance ; that imitation is suicide ; that 
he must take himself for better for A\^orse as 
his portion ; that though the wide universe is 
full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can 
come to him but through his toil bestowed 
on that plot of ground which is given to him 
to till. The power which resides in him is 
new in nature, and none but he knoAvs what 
that is which he can do, nor does he know 
until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, 
one character, one fact, makes much impres- 
sion on him, and another none. The sculp- 
ture in the memory is not without 23reestab- 
lished harmony. The eye Avas placed where 
one ray should fall, that it might testif}^ of 
that particular ray. We but half express our- 
selves, and are ashamed of that divine idea 
w^hich each of us represents. It may be 
safely trusted as proportionate and of good 
42 



Self-Reliance 

issues, so it be faithfullv imparted, but God 
will not have his work made manifest by 
cowards. A man is relieved and gay when 
he has put his heart into his work and done 
his best; but what he has said or done 
otherwise shall give him no peace. It is a 
deliverance which does not deliver. In the 
attempt his genius deserts him ; no muse be- 
friends; no invention, no hope. 

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that 
iron string. Accept the place the divine 
providence has found for you, the society 
of your contemporaries, the connection of 
events. Great men have always done so, 
and confided themselves childlike to the 
genius of their age, betraying their percep- 
tion that the absolutely trustworthy was 
seated at their heart, v^orking through their 
hands, predominating in all their being. 
And we are now men, and must accept in the 
highest mind the same transcendent destin}^ ; 
and not minors and invalids in a protected 
corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolu- 
tion, but guides, redeemers and benefactors, 
obeying the Almighty effort and advancing 
on Chaos and the Dark. 

What pretty oracles nature yields us on 
this text in the face and behavior of children, 
babes, and even brutes! That divided and 
rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment be- 
cause our arithmetic has computed the 
strength and means opposed to our purpose, 
43 



Emerson 

these have not. Their mind being whole, 
their eye is as yet nnconquered, and when we 
look in their faces we are disconcerted. In- 
fancy conforms to nobody; all conform to it; 
so that one babe commonly makes four or 
five out of the adults who prattle and play 
to it. So God has armed youth and puberty 
and manhood no less with its ow^n piquancy 
and charm, and made it enviable and gra- 
cious and its claims not to be put b^^, if it 
will stand by itself. Do not think the youth 
has no force, because he cannot speak to you 
and me. Hark ! in the next room his voice is 
sufficiently clear and emphatic. It seems he 
knows how to speak to his contemporaries. 
Bashful or bold then, he will know how to 
make us seniors very unnecessary. 

The nonchalance of boys w^ho are sure of a 
dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord 
to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the 
healthy attitude of human nature. A boy is 
in the parlor what the pit is in the play- 
house; independent, irresponsible, looking 
out from his corner on such people and facts 
as pass by, he tries and sentences them on 
their merits, in the swift, summary way of 
bo^^s, as good, bad, interesting, silh^, elo- 
quent, troublesome. He cumbers himself 
never about consequences, about interests; 
he gives an independent, genuine verdict. 
You must court him; he does not court you* 
But the man is as it were clapped into jail 
44 



oeii-r^eiiance 

by his consciousness. As soon as he has once 
acted or spoken with eclat he is a committed 
person, watched b\^ the sympathy or the 
hatred of hundreds, whose aSections must 
now enter into his account. There is no 
Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again 
into his neutraHty! Who can thus avoid all 
pledges and, having observed, observe again 
from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbriba- 
ble, unaffrighted innocence, — must alwa\^s be 
formidable. He would utter opinions on all 
passing affairs, which being seen to be not 
private but necessary, Avould sink like darts 
into the ear of men and put them in fear. 

These are the voices which we hear in soli- 
tude, but they grow faint and inaudible as 
we enter into the Avorld. Society everywhere 
is in conspiracy against the manhood of 
every one of its members. Society is a joint- 
stock company, in which the members agree, 
for the better securing of his bread to each 
shareholder, to surrender the liberty and cul- 
ture of the eater. The virtue in most request 
is conformity. Seff-reliance is its aversion. 
It loves not realities and creators, but names 
and customs. 

Whoso Avould be a man, must be a non- 
conformist. He who would gather immortal 
palms must not be hindered by the name of 
goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. 
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of 
your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, 
45 



Emerson 

and \^ou shall have the suffrage of the world. 
I remember an answer which \vhen quite 
3^oiing I was prompted to make to a valued 
adviser v^^ho was wont to importune me with 
the dear old doctrines of the church. On my 
sa\ang, ''What have I to do with the sacred- 
ness of traditions, if I live Avholh' from 
wathin?" my friend suggested, — "But these 
impulses ma\^ be from below, not from 
above." I replied, "They do not seem to me 
to be such ; but if I am the Devil's child, I 
will live then from the Devil." No la\v can 
be sacred to me but that of my nature. 
Good and bad are but names very readily 
transferable to that or this; the only right 
is what is after my constitution; the only 
wrong what is against it. A man is to 
carry himself in the presence of all opposi- 
tion as if every thing were titular and ephem- 
eral but he. I am ashamed to think how 
easily we capitulate to badges and names, to 
large societies and dead institutions. Every 
decent and well-spoken individual affects and 
swa\"S me more than is right. I ought to go 
upright and vital, and speak the rude truth 
in all ways. If malice and vanit\" wear the 
coat of philanthropy, shall that pass? If an 
angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of 
Abolition, and comes to me with his last 
news from Barbadoes, w^hy should I not say 
to him, *'Go love thy infant; love thy wood- 
chopper ; be good-natured and modest ; have 
46 



Self-Reliance 

that grace; and never varnish your hard, 
uncharitable ambition with this incredible 
tenderness for black folk a thousand miles 
off. Thy love afar is spite at home." Rough 
and graceless would be such greeting, but 
truth is handsomer than the affectation of 
love. Your goodness must have some love 
to.it, — else it is none. The doctrine of hatred 
must be preached, as the counteraction of the 
doctrine of love, when that pules and vrhines. 
I shun father and mother and v^4fe and 
brother \vhen my genius calls iuq. I would 
write on the lintels of the door-post. Whim. 
I hope it is somewhat better than v.^him at 
last, but v^'e ca.nnot spend the day in expla- 
nation. Expect me not to show cause wh^^ I 
seek or why I exclude company. Then again, 
do not tell mt, as a good man did to-da\^, of 
my obligation to put all poor men in good 
situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, 
thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the 
dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men 
as do not belong to me and to whom I do 
not belong. There is a class of persons to 
whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought 
and sold ; for them I will go to prison if need 
be ; but your miscellaneous popular charities ; 
the edtication at college of fools; the building 
of meeting-houses to the vain end to which 
many now stand; alms to sots, and the 
thousandfold Relief Societies; — though I con- 
fess with shame I sometimes succumb and 
47 



Emerson 

give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, which 
by and bv I shall have the manhood to with- 
hold. 

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather 
the exception than the rule. There is the 
man and his virtues. Men do what is called 
a good action, as some piece of courage or 
charity, much as they w^ould pay a fine in 
expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. 
Their works are done as an apology or ex- 
tenuation of their living in the world, — as 
invalids and the insane pay a high board. 
Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to 
expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and 
not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it 
should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine 
and equal, than that it should be glittering 
and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and 
sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. I 
ask primary evidence that you are a man, 
and refuse this appeal from the man to his 
actions. I know that for myself it makes no 
difference whether I do or forbear those 
actions Avhich are reckoned excellent. I can- 
not consent to pay for a privilege where I 
have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my 
gifts m_ay be, I actually am, and do not need 
for my own assurance or the assurance of 
my fellows any secondary testimony. 

What I must do is all that concerns me, not 
what the people think. This rule, equally ardu- 
ous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve 
48 



Self-Reliance 

for the whole distinction between greatness 
and meanness. It is the harder because \^ou 
will alwa\^s find those who think thej know 
what is your duty better than you know it, 
It is easy in the world to live after the 
world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live 
after our own ; but the great man is he who 
in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect 
sweetness the independence of solitude. 

The objection to conforming to usages 
that have become dead to you is that it 
scatters your force. It loses your time and 
blurs the impression of your character. If 
you maintain a dead church, contribute to a 
dead Bible-society, vote with a great party 
either for the governm^ent or against it, 
spread \^our table like base housekeepers, — 
under all these screens I have difficult^^ to 
detect the precise man you are: and of course 
so much force is v^athdrawn from your proper 
life. But do your work, and I shall know 
you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce 
yourself. A man must consider what ' a 
blindman's-buff is this gam.e of conformity. 
If I know your sect I anticipate your argu- 
ment. I hear a preacher announce for his 
text and topic the expediency of one of the 
institutions of his church. Do I not know 
beforehand that not possibh^ can he say a 
new and spontaneous word? Do I not know 
that with all this ostentation of examining 
the grounds of the institution he will do no 
4 49 



Emerson 

such thing? Do I not know that he is 
j^ledged to himself not to look but at one 
side, the permitted side, not as a man, but 
as a parish minister? He is a retained at- 
torne}^, and these airs of the bench are the 
emptiest affectation. Well, most men have 
bound their eyes with one or another hand- 
kerchief, and attached themselves to some 
one of these communities of opinion. This 
conformitv makes them not false in a fe^w 
particulars, authors of a fev^^ lies, but false in 
all particulars. Their ever\^ truth is not 
quite true. Their two is not the real two, 
their four not the real four; so that every 
v\"ord they say chagrins us and w^e kno\v not 
where to begin to set them right. Meantime 
nature is not slovv^ to equip us in the prison- 
uniform of the part\^ to v^^hich Ave adhere. 
We come to wear one cut of face and figure, 
and acquire b\" degrees the gentlest asinine 
expression. There is a mortifying experience 
in particular, which does not fail to wreak 
itself also in the general histor\^; I mean *'the 
foolish face of praise," the forced smile which 
we put on in company vi'^here we do not feel 
at ease, in answer to conversation which 
does not interest us. The muscles, not spon- 
taneoush^ moved but moved b\^ a low usurp- 
ing ^alfulness, grow tight about the outline 
of the face, w^ith the most disagreeable sen- 
sation. 
For nonconformity the \vorld whips you 
50 



Self-Reliance 

with its displeasure. And therefore a man 
ninst know how to estimate a sour face. 
The bj-standers look askance on him in the 
public street or in the friend's parlor. If this 
a.Yersation had its origin in contempt and 
resistance like his own he might well go 
home with a sad countenance ; but the sour 
faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, 
have no deep cause, but are put on and off 
as the wind blows and a newspaper directs. 
Yet is the discontent of the multitude more 
formidable than that of the senate and the 
college. It is easy enough for a firm m.an 
who knows the world to brook the rage of 
the cultivated classes. Their rage is decorous 
and prudent, for they are timid, as being 
very vulnerable themselves. But when to 
their feminine rage the indignation of the 
people is added, when the ignorant and the 
poor are aroused, when the unintelligent 
brute force that lies at the bottom of society 
is made to growl and mow, it needs the 
habit of magnanimity and religion to treat 
it godlike as a trifle of no concernment. 

The other terror that scares us from self- 
trust is our consistency ; a reverence for our 
past act or word because the eyes of others 
have no other data for computing our orbit 
than our past acts, and we are loath to dis- 
appoint them. 

But why should you keep your head over 
your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse 
51 



Emerson 

of your memory, lest ^^ou contradict some- 
w^hat you have stated in this or that pubhc 
place? Suppose you should contradict your- 
self; what then? It seems to be a rule of 
-wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, 
scarcely even in acts of pure memor\^, but to 
bring the past for judgment into the thou- 
sand-eyed present, and live ever in a nev^ 
day. In your metaphysics you have denied 
personality to the Deit}^, j^et vv^hen the de- 
vout motions of the soul come, jmld to them 
heart and life, though they should clothe God 
v^ath shape and color. Leave your theory, 
as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, 
and flee. 

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of 
little minds, adored by little statesmen and 
philosophers and divines. With consistency a 
great soul has simply nothing to do. He 
may as well concern himself with his shadowr 
on the wall. Speak w^hat you think now in 
hard words and to-morrow speak what to- 
morrow thinks in hard words again, though 
it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 
^^\h, so you shall be sure to be misunder- 
stood.'^ — Is it so bad then to be misunder- 
stood? P^^thagoras was misunderstood, and 
Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Coper- 
nicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every 
pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To 
be great is to be misunderstood. 

I suppose no man can violate his nature. 
52 



Self-Reliance 

All the sallies of his will are rounded in hy 
the law of his being, as the ineqiialities of 
Andes and Himmaleh are insignificant in the 
curve of the sphere. Nor does it matter how 
you gauge and try him. A character is like 
an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; — read it 
forward, backword, or across, it still spells 
the same thing. In this pleasing contrite 
wood-life ^vhich God alloAvs me, let me re- 
cord day by day my honest thought without 
prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, 
it will be found symmetrical, though I mean 
it not and see it not. My book should smell 
of pines and resound with the hum of insects. 
The swallow over my AvindoAv should inter- 
weave that thread or straw he carries in his 
bill into my web also. We pass for what 
we are. Character teaches above our wills. 
Men imagine that they communicate their 
virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do 
not see that virtue or vice emit a breath 
every moment. 

There will be an agreement in whatever 
variety of actions, so they be each honest 
and natural in their hour. For of one will, 
the actions will be harmonious, however un- 
like they seem. These varieties are lost sight 
of at a little distance, at a little height of 
thought. One tendency unites them all. 
The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line 
of a hundred tacks. See the line from a 
sufiicient distance, and it straightens itself to 
53 



Emerson 

the average tendenc3\ Your genuine action 
will explain itself and w411 explain jour other 
genuine actions. Your conforniitj explains 
nothing. Act singly, and what you have 
already done singly will justify you now. 
Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be 
firm enough to-day to do right and scorn 
eyes, I must have done so much right before 
as to defend me now. Be it how it will, 
do right now. Alwa\^s scorn appearances 
and you always may. The force of char- 
acter is cumulative. All the foregone days 
of virtue work their health into this. 
What makes the majesty of the heroes of the 
senate and the field, which so fills the im- 
agination? The consciousness of a train of 
great days and victories behind. They shed 
an united light on the advancing actor. He 
is attended as by a visible escort of angels. 
That is it which throws thunder into Chat- 
ham's voice, and dignity into Washington's 
port, and America into Adams's eye. Honor 
is venerable to us because it is no ephemera. 
It is always ancient virtue. We worship it 
to-day because it is not of to-day. We loA^e 
it and pay it homage because it is not a 
trap for our love and homage, but is self- 
dependent, self-derived, and therefore of an 
old immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a 
young person. 

I hope in these days we have heard the last 
of conformity and consistency. Let the 
54 



Self-Reliance 

-words be gazetted and ridiculons hencefor- 
ward. Instead of the gong for dinner, let us 
hear a whistle from the Spartan fife. Let us 
never bow and apologize more. A great man 
is coming to eat at mj house. I do not 
wish to please him; I wish that he should 
wash to please me. I will stand here for 
humanity, and though I would make it 
kind, I would make it true. Let us aifront 
and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and 
squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in 
the face of custom and trade and office, the 
fact which is the upshot of all history, that 
there is a great responsible Thinker and 
Actor working wherever a man works ; that 
a true man belongs to no other time or 
place, but is the centre of things. Where he 
is, there is nature. He measures 3^ou and all 
men and all events. Ordinarih^, every body 
in society reminds us of somewhat else, or of 
some other person. Character, reality, re- 
minds you of nothing else ; it takes place of 
the whole creation. The man must be so 
much that he must make all circumstances 
indifferent. Every true man is a cause, a 
country, and an age ; requires infinite spaces 
and numbers and time fully to accomplish 
his design ; — and posterity seem to follow^ his 
steps as a train of clients. A man C^sar is 
born, and for ages after we have a Roman 
Empire. Christ is born, and millions of 
minds so grow and cleave to his genius that 
55 



Emerson 

he is confounded with virtue and the possible 
of man. An institution is the lengthened 
shadow of one man; as, Monachism, of 
the Hermit Antony; the Reformation, of 
Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of 
Wesley ; Abolition, of Clarkson. Scipio, Mil- 
ton called ''the height of Rome''; and all 
history resolves itself very easily into the 
biography of a few stout and earnest per- 
sons. 

Let a man then know his v^^orth, and keep 
things under his feet. Let him not peep or 
steal, or skulk up and down with the air of 
a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper in 
the world which exists for him. But the man 
in the street, finding no worth in himself 
which corresponds to the force which built a 
tow^er or sculptured a marble god, feels poor 
when he looks on these. To him a palace, a 
statue, or a costly book have an alien and 
forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and 
seem to say like that, ''Who are you, Sir?" 
Yet they all are his, suitors for his notice, 
petitioners to his faculties that they will 
come out and take possession. The picture 
waits for my verdict ; it is not to command 
me, but I am to settle its claims to praise. 
That popular fable of the sot who was 
picked up dead-drunk in the street, carried to 
the duke's house, washed and dressed and 
laid in the duke's bed, and, on his \vaking, 
treated with all obsequious ceremony like 
56 



Seli-Reliance 

the duke, and assured that he had been in- 
sane, OAves its popularity to the fact that it 
s\^niboHzes so well the state of man, who is 
in the world a sort of sot, but now and then 
wakes up, exercises his reason and finds him- 
self a true prince. 

Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. 
In history our imagination plays us false. 
Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, 
are a gaudier vocabulary than private John 
and Edward in a small house and common 
day's work; but the things of life are the 
same to both ; the sum total of both is the 
same. Why all this deference to Alfred and 
Scanderbeg and Gustavus? Suppose they 
were virtuous ; did the\- wear out virtue? As 
great a stake depends on \^our private act 
to-day as folloAved their public and reno^vned 
steps. When private men shall act with 
-original vie^v^s, the lustre will be transferred 
from the actions of kinoes to those of orentle- 
men. 

The world has been instructed by its kings, 
who have so magnetized the eyes of nations. 
It has been taught by this colossal symbol 
the mutual reverence that is due from man to 
man. The joyful loyalty Avith which men 
have everywhere suffered the king, the noble, 
or the great proprietor to walk among them 
b\^ £. law of his own, make his own scale of 
men and things and reverse theirs, pay for 
benefits not with money but with honor, and 
57 



Emerson 

represent the law in his person, was the hier- 
oglyphic by which thev obscurely signified 
their consciousness of their own right and 
comeliness, the right of every man. 

The magnetism which all original action 
exerts is explained when we inquire the rea- 
son of self-trnst. Who is the Trustee? What 
is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal 
reliance may be grounded? What is the 
nature and power of that science-bafiling 
star, without parallax, without calculable 
elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even 
into trivial and impure actions, if the least 
mark of independence appear? The inquiry 
leads us to that source, at once the essence 
of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call 
Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this 
primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later 
teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, 
the last fact behind which analysis cannot- 
go, all things find their common origin. For 
the sense of being which in calm hours rises, 
we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse 
from things, from space, from light, from 
time, from man, but one with them and pro- 
ceeds obviously from the same source whence 
their life and being also proceed. We first 
share the life by which things exist and 
afterwards see them as appearances in nature 
and forget that w^e have shared their ciuse. 
Here is the fountain of action and of 
thought. Here are the lungs of that inspira- 
58 



Self-Reliance 

tion wliich giveth man wisdom and which 
cannot be denied without impiety and athe- 
ism. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, 
which makes us receivers of its truth and 
organs of its activity. WTien we discern jus- 
tice, when we discern truth, we do nothing 
of ourselves, but allow a passage to its 
beams. If we ask v^^hence this com.es, if we 
seek to pry into the soul that causes, all 
philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its 
absence is all we can affirm. Every man 
discriminates between the voluntary acts of 
his mind and his involuntary perceptions, 
and knows that to his involuntary percep- 
tions a perfect faith is due. He may err in 
the expression of them, but he knows that 
these things are so, like day and night, not 
to be disputed. My wilful actions and acqui- 
sitions are but roving ; — the idlest reverie, the 
faintest native emotion, command my curi- 
osity and respect. Thoughtless people con- 
tradict as readily the statement of percep- 
tions as of opinions, or rather much more 
readily ; for they do not distinguish between 
perception and motion. They fancy that I 
choose to see this or that thing. But per- 
ception is not whimsical, but fatal. If I see 
a trait, my children will see it after me, and 
in course of time all mankind, — although it 
may chance that no one has seen it before 
me. For my perception of it is as much a 
fact as the sun. 

59 



Emerson 

The relations of the soul to the divine 
spirit are so pure that it is profane to seek 
to interpose helps. It must be that when 
God speaketh he should communicate, not 
one thing, but all things; should fill the 
w^orld ^th his voice; should scatter forth 
light, nature, time, souls, from the centre of 
the present thought ; and new date and new 
create the v^^hole. Whenever a mind is simple 
and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass 
away, — means, teachers, texts, temples fall; 
it lives now, and absorbs past and future 
into the present hour. All things are made 
sacred by relation to it, — one as much as an- 
other. All things are dissolved to their 
centre by their cause, and in the universal 
miracle petty and particular miracles disap- 
pear. If therefore a man claims to know^ and 
speak of God and carries you backward to 
the phraseology of some old mouldered na- 
tion in another country, in another world, 
believe him not. Is the acorn better than the 
oak which is its fulness and completion? Is 
the parent better than the child into whom 
he has cast his ripened being? Whence then 
this worship of the past? The centuries are 
conspirators against the sanity and author- 
ity of the soul. Time and space are but 
physiological colors which the eye makes, 
but the soul is light: where it is, is day; 
where it was, is night; and history is an 
impertinence and an injury if it be any thing 
60 



Self-Reliance 

more than a cheerful apologue or parable of 
my being and becoming. 

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no 
longer upright ; he dares not sav ''I think," 
**I am," but Cjuotes some saint or sage. He 
is ashamed before the blade of grass or the 
blo^ving rose. These roses under mj window 
make no reference to former roses or to bet- 
ter ones ; they are for what thev are ; thev 
exist with God to-day. There is no time to 
them. There is simply the rose ; it is perfect 
in every moment of its existence. Before a 
leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts ; in the 
full-blown flower there is no more; in the 
leafless root there is no less. Its nature is 
satisfied and it satisfies nature in all mo- 
ments alike. But man postpones or remem- 
bers; he does not live in the present, but 
w^ith reverted eye laments the past, or, heed- 
less of the riches that surround him, stands 
on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot 
be happy and strong until he too lives with 
nature in the present, above time. 

This should be plain enough. Yet see 
what strong intellects dare not yet hear God 
himself unless he speak the phraseology of I 
know not what David, or Jeremiah, or 
Paul. We shall not always set so great a 
price on a few texts, on a few lives. We are 
like children who repeat by rote the sentences 
of grandames and tutors, and, as they grow 
older, of the men of talents and character 
61 



fe 



Emerson 

they chance to see, — painfully recollecting the 
exact words they spoke; afterwards, when 
they come into the point of view which those 
had \vho uttered these sayings, they under- 
stand them and are willing to let the words 
go; for at any time they can use words as 
good when occasion com.es. If we live truly, 
we shall see truly. It is as easy for the 
strong man to be strong, as it is for the 
weak to be weak, When we have new per- 
ception, we shall gladly disburden the mem- 
ory of its hoarded treasures as old rubbish. 
When a man lives with God, his voice shall 
be as s^^eet as the murmur of the brook and 
the rustle of the corn. 

And now at last the highest truth on this 
subject remains unsaid; probably cannot be 
said ; for all that we say is the far-off re- 
membering of the intuition. That thought 
by ^what I can now nearest approach to say 
it, is this. W^hen good is near you, when you 
have life in yourself, it is not by any known 
or accustomed way; you shall not discern 
the footprints of any other; you shall not see 
the face of man; you shall not hear any 
name; — the way, the thought, the good, 
shall be wholly strange and new. It shall 
exclude example and experience. You take 
the Avay from man, not to man. All persons 
that ever existed are itS :^orgotten ministers. 
Fear and hope are alike beneath it. There is 
somewhat low even in hope. In the hour of 
62 



Self-Reliance 

vision there is nothing that can be called 
gratitude, nor jDroperlj joj. The soul raised 
over passion beholds identity and eternal 
causation, perceives the self-existence of 
Truth and Right, and calms itself with know- 
ing that all things go well. Vast spaces of 
nature, the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea; 
long intervals of time, years, centuries, are 
of no account. This which I think and feel 
underlay every former state of life and cir- 
cumstances, as it does underlie my present, 
and what is called life and what is called 
death. 

Life only avails, not the having lived. 
Power ceases in the instant of repose ; it re- 
sides in the moment of transition from a 
past to a new state, in the shooting of the 
gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact 
the world hates ; that the soul becomes; for 
that forever degrades the past, turns all 
riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, 
confounds the saint \vith the rogue, shoves 
Jesus and Judas equally aside. Why then do 
we prate of self-reliance? Inasmuch as the 
soul is present there will be power not con- 
fident but agent. To talk of reliance is a 
poor external v^ay of speaking. Speak 
rather of that which relies because it works 
and is. Who has more obedience than I mas- 
ters me, though he should not raise his 
finger. Round him I must revolve by the 
gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric 
63 



Emerson 

when we speak of eminent virtue. We do not 
yet see that virtue is Height, and that a man 
or a company of men, plastic and permeable 
to principles, hj the law of nature must 
overpower and ride all cities, nations, kings, 
rich men, poets, who are not. 

This is the ultimate fact which we so 
quickly reach on this, as on every topic, the 
resolution of all into the ever-blessed One. 
Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme 
Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good 
by the degree in v^^iich it enters into all 
lo^wer forms. All things real are so by so 
much virtue as they contain. Commerce, 
husbandry, hunting, Avhaling, war, elo- 
quence, personal w^eight, are somewhat, and 
engage my respect PcS examples of its presence 
and impure action. I see the same law 
w^orking in nature for conservation and 
growth. Pov\^er is, in nature, the essential 
measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to 
remain in her kingdoms which cannot help 
itself. The genesis and maturation of a 
planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree 
recovering itself from the strong wind, the 
vital resources of every animal and vegetable, 
are demonstrations of the self-sufficing and 
therefore self-relying soul. 

Thus all concentrates : let us not rove ; let 

us sit at home Avith the cause. Let us stun 

and astonish the intruding rabble of men and 

books and institutions by a simple declara- 

64 



Self-Reliance 

tion of the divine fact. Bid the invaders take 
the shoes from off their feet, for God is here 
within. Let our simpHcitj judge them, and 
our docility to our own law demonstrate the 
poverty of nature and fortune beside our 
native riches. 

But now we are a mob. Man does not 
stand in awe of man, nor is his genius ad- 
monished to stay at home, to put itself in 
communication with the internal ocean, but 
it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the 
urns of other men. We must go alone. I 
like the silent church before the service be- 
gins, better than any preaching. How far 
off, ho^v cool, ho\v chaste the persons look, 
begirt each one w4th a precinct or sanctuary ! 
So let us always sit. WTay should we as- 
sume the faults of our friend, or wffe, or 
father, or child, because they sit around our 
hearth, or are said to have the same blood? 
All men have my blood and I have all men's. 
Not for that will I adopt their petulance or 
folly, even to the extent of being ashamed of 
it. But \'our isolation must not be mechan- 
ical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation. 
At times the whole world seems to be in 
conspiracy to importune you with emphatic 
trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, 
want, charity, all knock at once at thy 
closet door and say, — ''Come out unto us.'* 
But keep thy state, come not into their con- 
fusion. The poAver men possess to annoy me 
5 65 



Emerson 

I give them by a weak curiosity. No man 
can come near me but through my act. 
*'What we love that we have, but by desire 
^we bereave ourselves of the love." 

If w^e cannot at once rise to the sanctities 
of obedience and faith, let us at least resist 
our temptations; let us enter into the state 
of w^ar and wake Thor and Woden, courage 
and constancy, in our Saxon breasts. This 
is to be done in our smooth times by speak- 
ing the truth. Check this lying hospitality 
and lying afection. Live no longer to the 
expectation of these deceived and deceiving 
people with whom Ave converse. Say to 
them, '^0 father, mother, wife, brother, 

friend, I have lived ^vith ^^ou after ap- 
pearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the 
truth's. Be it kno^vn unto you that hence- 
forward I obey no la\^ less than the eternal 
law. I Avill have no covenants but proximi- 
ties. I shall endeavor to nourish my parents, 
to support my familj^, to be the chaste hus- 
band of one wife, — but these relations I must 
fill after a rie^v and unprecedented way. I 
appeal from your customs. I must be myself. 

1 cannot break myself any longer for you, or 
you. If you can love me for what I am, we 
shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will 
still seek to deserve that you should. I will 
not hide my tastes or aversions. I wiU so 
trust that what is deep is hoh^, that I will 
do strongly before the sun and moon what- 

66 



Self-Reliance 

ever inly rejoices me and the heart appoints. 
If \^ou are noble, I will love you ; if you are 
not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypo- 
critical attentions. If 3'ou are true, but not 
in the same truth with me, cleave to your 
companions ; I will seek my own. I do this 
not selfishly but humbly and truly. It is 
alike \"our interest, and mine, and all men's, 
however long vre have dwelt in lies, to live 
in truth. Does this sound harsh to-day? 
You \t'ill soon love v^hat is dictated by your 
nature as well as mine, and if \ve follow the 
truth it will bring us out safe at last.'' — But 
so may x^ou give these friends pain. Yes, but 
I cannot sell my libert\^ and my power, to 
save their sensibility. Besides, all persons 
have their moments of reason, when they 
look out into the region of absolute truth; 
then will they justify me and do the same 
thing. 

The populace think that your rejection of 
popular standards is a rejection of all stand- 
ard, and mere antinomianism ; and the bold 
sensualist will use the name of philosophy to 
gild his crimes. But the law of consciousness 
abides. There are tAvo confessionals, in one 
or the other of vt^hich we must be shriven. 
You may fulfil your round of duties by clear- 
ing yourself in the direct , or in the re£ex 
way. Consider vrhether you have satisfied 
your relations to father, mother, cousin, 
neighbor, town, cat and dog; whether any 
67 



Emerson 

of these can upbraid you. But I may also 
neglect this reflex standard and absolve me 
to myself. I have my own stern claims and 
perfect circle. It denies the name of duty to 
many offices that are called duties. But if I 
can discharge its debts it enables me to dis- 
pense with the popular code. If any one 
imagines that this law is lax, let him keep 
its commandment one day. 

And truly it demands something godlike in 
him v^ho has cast off the common motives of 
humanity, and has ventured to trust himself 
for a taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful 
his v^ill, clear his sight, that he may in good 
earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, 
that a simple purpose may be to him as 
strong as iron necessity is to others! 

If any man consider the present aspects of 
w^hat is called by distinction society^ he will 
see the need of these ethics. The sinew and 
heart of man seem to be dra^wn out, and we 
are become timorous, desponding v^^himper- 
ers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, 
afraid of death and afraid of each other. 
Our age yields no great and perfect persons. 
We w^ant men and women w^ho shall reno- 
vate life and our social state, but we see that 
most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy 
their own wants, have an ambition out of 
all proportion to their practical force and do 
lean and beg day and night continually. 
Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our 
68 



Self-Reliance 

occupations, our marriages, our religion we 
have not chosen, but society has chosen for 
us. We are parlor soldiers. We shun the 
rugged battle of fate, where strength is born. 
If our 3"Oung men miscarry in their first 
enterprises they lose all heart. If the young 
merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the 
finest genius studies at one of our colleges 
and is not installed in an office ^thin one 
year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of 
Boston or New York, it seems to his friends 
and to himself that he is right in being dis- 
heartened and in complaining the rest of his 
life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or 
Vermont, who in turn tries all the profes- 
sions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps 
a school, preaches, edits a ne^^spaper, goes 
to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, 
in successive years, and always like a cat 
falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these 
city dolls. He walks abreast with his days 
and feels no shame in not ^^studying a pro- 
fession," for he does not postpone his life, 
but lives already. He has not one chance, 
but a hundred chances. Let a Stoic open the 
resources of man and tell men they are not 
leaning willows, but can and must detach 
themselves; that with the exercise of self- 
trust, new powers shall appear ; that a man 
is the word made flesh, born to shed healing 
to the nations ; that he should be ashamed of 
our compassion, and that the moment he 
69 



Emerson 

acts from himself, tossing the laws, the 
books, idolatries and customs out of the 
window, we pitv him no more but thank and 
revere him; — and that teacher shall restore 
the life of man to splendor and make his 
name dear to all history. 

It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance 
must work a revolution in all the offices and 
relations of men ; in their religion ; in their 
education; in their pursuits; their modes of 
living; their associations; in their property; 
in their speculative views. 

1. In what prayers do men allow them- 
selves ! That which they call a holy office is 
not so much as brave and manly. Prayer 
looks abroad and asks for some foreign ad- 
dition to come through some foreign virtue, 
and loses itself in endless mazes of natural 
and supernatural, and mediatorial and mi- 
raculous. Prayer that craves a particular 
commodity, anything less than all good, is 
vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the 
facts of life from the highest point of view. 
It is the solilocjuy of a beholding and jubi- 
lant soul. It is the spirit of God pronounc- 
ing his works good. But prayer as a means 
to effect a private end is meanness and theft. 
It supposes dualism and not unity in nature 
and consciousness. As soon as the man is at 
one with God, he will not beg. He will then 
see prayer in all action. The prayer of the 
farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the 
70 



Self-Reliance 

prayer of the rox\^er kneeling with the stroke 
of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout 
nature, though for cheap ends. Caratach, in 
Fletcher's Bonduca, ^vhen admonished to in- 
quire the mind of the god Audate, replies, — 

''His hidden meaning lies in our endeavors; 
Our valors are our best gods." 

Another sort of false prayers are our re- 
grets. Discontent is the want of self-reliance : 
it is infirmit\^ of will. Regret calamities if 
3^ou can thereby help the sufierer ; if not, at- 
tend your own work and already the evil be- 
gins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as 
base. We come to them who weep foolishly 
and sit down and cry for compan^^, instead 
of imparting to them truth and health in 
rough electric shocks, putting them once 
more in communication with their ov^m rea- 
son. The secret of fortune is joy in our 
hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men 
is the self-helping man. For him all doors 
are flung wide; hin* all tongues greet, all 
honors crov^m, all eyes follow with desire. 
Our love goes out to him and embraces him 
because he did not need it. We solicitously 
and apologetically caress and celebrate him 
because he held on his v^^ay and scorned our 
disapprobation. The gods love him because 
men hated him. ''To the persevering mor- 
tal," said Zoroaster, ''the blessed Immortals 
are swift." 

71 



Emerson 

As men's prayers are a disease of the will, 
so are their creeds a disease of the intellect. 
They say with those foolish Israelites, ^'Let 
not God speak to ns, lest we die. Speak 
thon, speak any man with ns, and we will 
obey." Everywhere I am hindered of meet- 
ing God in my brother, because he has shut 
his own temple doors and recites fables 
merely of his brother's, or his brother's 
brother's God. Ever^^ new mind is a new 
classification. If it prove a mind of uncom- 
mon activity and power, a Locke, a Lavoi- 
sier, a Hutton, a Bentham, a Fourier, it im- 
poses its classification on othef" men, and 
lo ! a new system. In proportion to the 
depth of the thought, and so to the number 
of the objects it touches and brings within 
reach of the pupil, is his complacenc\\ But 
chiefly is this a]3parent in creeds and churches 
which are also classifications of some power- 
ful mind acting on the elemental thought of 
duty and man's relation to the Highest. 
Such is Calvinism, Quakerism, Swedenborg- 
ism. The pupil takes the -same delight in 
subordinating every thing to the new ter- 
minology as a girl who has just learned 
botan^^ in seeing a new earth and new sea- 
sons thereby. It will hapjDcn for a time that 
the pupil wall find his intellectual power has 
grown by the study of his master's mind. 
But in all unbalanced minds the classification 
is idolized, passes for the end and not for a 
72 



Self-Reliance 

speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls 
of the system blend to their eye in the re- 
mote horizon with the walls of the universe ; 
the luminaries of heaven seem to them hung 
on the arch their master built. They cannot 
imagine hov^ you aliens have any right to 
see, — how you can see; ''It must be some- 
how that you stole the light from us." 
They do not yet perceive that light, unsys- 
tematic, indomitable, will break into any 
cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp 
a^^hile and call it their own. If they are 
honest and do well, presently their neat new 
pinfold ^vill be too strait and low, w411 
crack, will lean, vi411 rot and vanish, and the 
immortal light, all young and joyful, million- 
orbed, million-colored, will beam over the 
universe as on the first morning. 

2. It is for want of self-culture that the 
superstition of Travelling, whose idols are 
Itah^, England, Egypt, retains its fascina- 
tion for all educated Americans. They who 
made England, Itah^, or Greece venerable in 
the imagination, did so by sticking fast 
where they were, like an axis of the earth. 
In manly hours we feel that duty is our 
place. The soul is no traveller ; the vrise man 
stays at home, and vi^hen his necessities, his 
duties, on any occasion call him from his 
house, or into foreign lands, he is at home 
still and shall make men sensible by the ex- 
pression of his countenance that he goes, the 
73 



Emerson 

missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits 
cities and men like a sovereign and not like 
an interloper or a valet. 

I have no chnrlisli objection to the circum- 
navigation of the globe for the purposes of 
art, of study, and benevolence, so that man 
is first domesticated, or does not go abroad 
with the hope of finding somewhat greater 
than he knows. He who travels to be 
amused, or to get somewhat which he does 
not carry, travels away from himself, and 
groAvs old even in youth among old things. 
In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind 
have become old and dilapidated as they. He 
carries ruins to ruins. 

Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first 
journeys discover to us the indifference of 
places. At home I dream that at Naples, at 
Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and 
lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace 
my friends, embark on the sea and at last 
wake up at Naples, and there beside me 
is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, 
identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vati- 
can and the palaces. I affect to be intoxi- 
cated with sights and suggestions, but I am 
not intoxicated. My giant goes with me 
wherever I go. 

3. But the rage of travelling is a symptom 
of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole 
intellectual action. The intellect is vaga- 
bond, and our' system of education fosters 
74 



Self-Reliance 

restlessness. Our minds travel when our 
bodies are forced to stay at home. We imi- 
tate; and what is imitation but the travel- 
ling of the mind? Our houses are built with 
foreign taste ; our shelves are garnished with 
foreign ornaments ; our opinions, our tastes, 
our faculties, lean, and follow^ the Past and 
the Distant. The soul created the arts w^her- 
ever they have flourished. It was in his own 
mind that the artist sought his model. It 
was an application of his own thought to 
the thing to be done and the conditions to 
be observed. And why need we copy the 
Doric or the Gothic model? Beaut\^, con- 
venience, grandeur of thought and quaint 
expression are as near to us as to any, and 
if the American artist will study Avith hope 
and love the precise thing to be done by him, 
considering the climate, the soil, the length 
of the day, the vrants of the peojDle, the 
habit and form of the government, he will 
create a house in which all these will find 
themselves fitted, and taste and ^jentiment 
will be satisfied also. 

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your 
o^wn gift you can present every moment 
with the cumulative force of a whole life's 
cultivation; but of the adopted talent of an- 
other you have only an extemporaneous half 
possession. That which each can do best, 
none but his Maker can teach him. No man 
jet knows what it is, nor can, till that per- 



Emerson 

son has exhibited it. Where is the master 
who could have taught Shakspeare? Where 
is the master ^who could have instructed 
Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or New- 
ton? Every great man is a unique. The 
Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he 
could not borrow. Shakspeare will never be 
made by the study of Shakspeare. Do that 
which is assigned you, and you cannot hope 
too much or dare too much. There is at 
this moment for you an utterance brave and 
grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phid- 
ias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen 
of Moses or Dante, but different from all 
these. Not possibly will the soul, all rich, 
all eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, 
deign to repeat itself; but if you can hear 
what these patriarchs say, surely you can 
reply to them in the same pitch of voice ; for 
the ear and the tongue are two organs of 
one nature. Abide in the simple and noble 
regions of thy life, obey thy heart and thou 
shalt reproduce the Foreworld again. 

4. As our Religion, our Education, our 
Art look abroad, so does our spirit of soci- 
ety. All men plume themselves on the im- 
provement of society, and no man improves. 

Society never advances. It recedes as fast 
on one side as it gains on the other. It 
undergoes continual changes ; it is barbarous, 
it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it 
is scientific ; but this change is not ameliora- 
76 



Self-Reliance 

tion. For every thing that is given some- 
thing is taken. Society acquires new arts 
and loses old instincts. What a contrast be- 
tween the well-clad, reading, writing, think- 
ing American, with a ^^atch, a pencil and a 
bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked 
New Zealander, whose property is a club, a 
spear, a mat, and an undivided tw^entieth of 
a shed to sleep under! But compare the 
health of the two men and you shall see that 
the white man has lost his aboriginal 
strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike 
the savage with a broad axe and in a day 
or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if 
you struck the blov^ into soft pitch, and the 
same blow shall send the white to his grave. 
The civilized man has built a coach, but 
has lost the use of his feet. He is supported 
on crutches, but lacks so much support of 
muscle. He has a fine Geneva ^^atch, but he 
fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. 
A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so 
being sure of the information when he wants 
it, the man in the street does not know a 
star in the sky. The solstice he does not 
observe; the equinox he knows a little; and 
the ^whole bright calendar of the year is 
without a dial in his mind. His note-books 
impair his memory ; his libraries overload his 
wit ; the insurance-ofiice increases the number 
of accidents; and it may be a question 
whether machinery does not encumber; 
77 



Emerson 

T^^hether we have not lost b}^ refinement some 
energ\", by a Christianity entrenched in es- 
tabHshments and forms some vigor of wild 
virtue. For everj^ Stoic was a Stoic ; but in 
Christendom where is the Christian? 

There is no more deviation in the moral 
standard than in the standard of height or 
bulk. No greater men are now than ever 
w^ere. A singular equality may be observed 
between the great men of the first and of the 
last ages ; nor can all the science, art, re- 
ligion, and philosophy of the nineteenth cen- 
tury" avail to educate greater men than 
Plutarch's heroes, three or four and twenty 
centuries ago. Not in time is the race pro- 
gressive. Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras, 
Diogenes, are great men, but they leave no 
class. He who is really of their class will 
not be called by their name, but will be his 
own man, and in his turn the founder of a 
sect. The arts and inventions of each period 
are only its costume and do not invigorate 
men. The harm of the improved machinery 
may compensate its good. Hudson and 
Behring accomplished so much in their fish- 
ing-boats as to astonish Parr}^ and Frank- 
lin, Avhose equipment exhausted the resources 
of science and art. Galileo, with an opera- 
glass, discovered a more splendid series of 
celestial phenomena than any one since. 
Columbus found the New World in an un- 
decked boat. It is curious to see the periodi- 
78 



Self-Reiiance 

cal disuse and perishing of means and ma- 
chinery Avhich were introduced with loud 
laudation a few \^ears or centuries before. 
The great genius returns to essential man. 
We reckoned the improvements of the art of 
war among the triuinphs of science, and vet 
Napoleon conquered Europe by the bivouac, 
which consisted of falling back on naked 
valor and disencumbering it of all aids. The 
Emperor held it impossible to make a perfect 
armv, says Las Casas, ''without abolishing 
our arms, magazines, commissaries and car- 
riages, until, in imitation of the Roman cus- 
tom, the soldier should receive his supply of 
corn, grind it in his hand-mill and bake his 
bread himself." 

Society is a wave. The w^ave moves on- 
ward, but the water of which it is composed 
does not. The same particle does not rise 
from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is 
only phenomenal. The persons who make 
up a nation to-day, next year die, and their 
experience dies with them. 

And so the reliance on Propert\^, including 
the reliance on governments which protect 
it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have 
looked away from themselves and at things 
so long that they have come to esteem the 
religious, learned and civil institutions as 
guards of property, and they deprecate as- 
saults on these, because they feel them to be 
assaults on property. They measure their 
79 



Emerson 

esteem of each other by what each has, and 
not by what each is. But a cultivated man 
becomes ashamed of his property, out of new 
respect for his nature. Especially he hates 
what he has if he see that it is accidental, — 
came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime ; 
then he feels that it is not having; it does 
not belong to him, has no root in him and 
merely lies there because no revolution or no 
robber takes it aw^ay. But that which a 
man is, does always by necessity acquire; 
and v^^hat the man acquires, is living prop- 
erty, which does not ^svait the beck of rulers, 
or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or 
bankruptcies, but perpetually renev^s itself 
wherever the man breathes. ''Thy lot or 
portion of life," said the Caliph Ali, ''is seek- 
ing after thee ; therefore be at rest from seek- 
ing after it." Our dependence on these 
foreign goods leads us to our slavish respect 
for numbers. The political parties meet in 
numerous conventions ; the greater the con- 
course and with each new uproar of an- 
nouncement. The delegation from Essex! 
The Democrats from New Hampshire! The 
Whigs of Maine ! the young patriot feels him- 
self stronger than before by a new thousand 
of e^^es and arms. In like manner the re- 
formers summon conventions and vote and 
resolve in multitude. Not so, friends ! will 
the God deign to enter and inhabit you, but 
by a method precisely the reverse. It is only 
80 



Self-Reliance 

as a man puts off all foreign support and 
stands alone that I see him to be strong and 
to prevail. He is ^veaker b\^ every recruit to 
his banner. Is not a man better than a 
town? Ask nothing of men, and, in the end- 
less mutation, thou only firm column must 
presently appear the upholder of all that sur- 
rounds thee. He ^^ho kno^svs that pow^er is 
inborn, that he is weak because he has 
looked for good out of him and elsewhere, 
and, so perceiving, throAvs himself unhesi- 
tatingly on his thought, instantly rights 
himself, stands in the erect position, com- 
mands his limbs, works miracles ; just as a 
man who stands on his feet is stronger than 
a man who stands on his head. 

So use all that is called Fortune. Most 
men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose 
all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave 
as unlawful these v^4nnings, and deal with 
Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God. In 
the Will work and acquire, and thou hast 
chained the w^heel of Chance, and shalt sit 
hereafter out of fear from her rotations. A 
political victor}^, a rise of rents, the recovery 
of your sick or the return of your absent 
friend, or some other favorable event raises 
your spirits, and you think good days are 
preparing for you. Do not believe it. Noth- 
ing can bring \-ou peace but yourself Noth- 
ing can bring you peace but the triumph of 
principles. 

6 81 



Nature 



83 



NATURE. 

There are da\^s which occur in this climate, 
at almost any season of the year, wherein 
the w^orld reaches its perfection; when the 
air, the heavenh^ bodies and the earth, make 
a harmony, as if nature would indulge her 
offspring ; when, in these bleak upper sides of 
the planet, nothing is to desire that we have 
heard of the happiest latitudes, and we bask 
in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba; 
wrhen everything that has life gives sign of 
satisfaction, and the cattle that lie on the 
ground seem to have great and tranquil 
thoughts. These halcyons may be looked for 
with a little more assurance in that pure 
October weather which we distinguish by the 
name of the Indian summer. The day, im- 
measurably long, sleeps over the broad 
hills and warm wide fields. To have lived 
through all its sunny hours, seems longevity 
enough. The solitary places do not seem 
quite lonely. At the gates of the forest, the 
surprised man of the world is forced to leave 
his city estimates of great and small, wise 
and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls 
ofi' his back with the first step he takes in- 
to these precincts. Here is sanctity which 
85 



Emerson 

shames our religions, and reality which dis- 
credits our heroes. Here Ave find Nature to 
be the circumstance which dwarfs every 
other circumstance, and judges like a god all 
men that come to her. We have crept out of 
our close and crowded houses into the night 
and morning, and we see what majestic 
beauties daily wrap us in their bosom. How 
willingh^ we w^ould escape the barriers which 
render them comparatively impotent, escape 
the sophistication and second thought, and 
suffer nature to intrance us. The tempered 
light of the woods is like a perpetual morn- 
ing, and is stimulating and heroic. The 
anciently-reported spells of these places creep 
on us. The stems of pines, hemlocks, and 
oaks almost gleam like iron on the excited 
e^^e. The incommunicable trees begin to per- 
suade us to live with them, and quit our life 
of solemn trifles. Here no histor\^, or church, 
or state, is interpolated on the divine sky 
and the immortal year. How easily we 
miight walk onward into the ojDcning land- 
scape, absorbed by new pictures and by 
thoughts fast succeeding each other, until by 
degrees the recollection of home was crowded 
out of the mind, all memory obliterated by 
the tyranny of the present, and Ave were led 
in triumph by nature. 

These enchantments are medicinal, they 
sober and heal us. These are plain pleasures, 
kindh^ and native to us. We come to our 
86 



Nature 

own, and make friends with matter, which 
the ambitious chatter of the schools would 
persuade us to despise. We never can part 
with it; the mind loves its old home: as 
water to our thirst, so is the rock, the 
ground, to our e\^es and hands and feet. It 
is firm water ; it is cold flame ; Avhat health, 
wrhat affinity I Ever an old friend, ever like 
a dear friend and brother when we chat 
affectedly with strangers, comes in this 
honest face, and takes a grave Hberty with 
us, and shames us out of our nonsense. 
Cities give not the human senses room 
enough. We go out daily and nightly to 
feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so 
much scope, just as we need water for our 
bath. There are all degrees of natural in- 
fluence, from these quarantine powers of 
nature, up to her dearest and gravest min- 
istrations to the imagination and the soul. 
There is the bucket of cold water from the 
spring, the wood-fire to which the chilled 
traveller rushes for safety,— and there is the 
sublime moral of autumn and of noon. We 
nestle in nature, and draw our living as 
parasites from her roots and grains, and we 
receive glances from the heavenh^ bodies, 
which call us to sohtude and foretell the 
remotest future. The blue zenith is the point 
in which romance and reality meet. I think 
if we should be rapt awa\^ into all that we 
dream of heaven, and should converse with 
87 



Emerson 

Gabriel and Uriel, the tipper sky would be all 
that would remain of our furniture. 

It seems as if the day was not wholly pro- 
fane in w^hich we have given heed to some 
natural object. The fall of snowflakes in a 
still air, preserving to each crystal its perfect 
form ; the bloAving of sleet over a wide sheet 
of v^ater, and over plains; the waving rye- 
field; the mimic waving of acres of hous- 
tonia, whose innumerable florets whiten and 
ripple before the eye ; the reflections of trees 
and flowers in glassy lakes; the musical 
steaming odorous south wind, which con- 
verts all trees to windharps; the crackling 
and spurting of hemlock in the flames, or of 
pine logs, which yield glory to the walls and 
faces in the sitting-room, — these are the music 
and pictures of the most ancient religion. 
My house stands in low land, with limited 
outlook, and on the skirt of the village. But 
I go with my friend to the shore of our little 
river, and with one stroke of the paddle I 
leave the village politics and personalities, 
yes, and the world of villages and person- 
alities, behind, and pass into a delicate 
realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright 
almost for spotted man to enter without 
novitiate and probation. We penetrate bod- 
ily this incredible beauty; \ve dip our 
hands in this painted element; our eyes are 
bathed in these lights and forms. A holiday, 
a villeggiatura, a royal revel, the proudest, 
88 



Nature 

most heart-rejoicing festival that valor and 
beauty, power and taste, ever decked and 
enjoyed, establishes itself on the instant. 
These sunset clouds, these delicately emerg- 
ing stars, with their private and ineffable 
glances, signify it and profier it. I am 
taught the poorness of our invention, the 
ugliness of towns and palaces. Art and lux- 
ury have early learned that they must work 
as enhancement and sequel to this original 
beauty. I am overinstructed for my return. 
Henceforth I shall be hard to please. I can- 
not go back to toys. I am gro^vn exjDcnsive 
and sophisticated. I can no longer live v^4th- 
out elegance, but a countryman shall be my 
master of revels. He w^ho knoAvs the most ; 
he who knows what sweets and virtues are 
in the ground, the waters, the plants, the 
heavens, and how to come at these enchant- 
ments, — is the rich and royal man. Only as 
far as the masters of the world have called 
in nature to their aid, can they reach the 
height of magnificence. This is the meaning 
of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden- 
houses, islands, parks and preserves, to back 
their faulty personality with these strong 
accessories. I do not wonder that the 
landed interest should be invincible in the 
State with these dangerous auxiliaries. 
These bribe and invite; not kings, not pal- 
aces, not men, not women, but these tender 
and poetic stars, eloquent of secret promises. 
89 



Emerson 

We heard what the rich man said, we knew 
of his villa, his grove, his wine and his com- 
pany, but the provocation and point of the 
invitation came out of these beguiling stars. 
In their soft glances I see what men strove 
to realize in some Versailles, or Paphos, or 
Ctesiphon. Indeed, it is the magical lights of 
the horizon and the blue skj for the back- 
ground which save all our works of art, 
which were otherwise bawbles. When the 
rich tax the poor v^ith servility and obse- 
quiousness, they should consider the effect of 
men reputed to be the possessors of nature, 
on imaginative minds. Ah ! if the rich \vere 
rich as the poor fancy riches ! A boy hears a 
military band play on the field at night, and 
he has kings and queens and famous chivalry 
palpably before him. He hears the echoes of 
a horn in a hill country, in the Notch Moun- 
tains, for example, w^hich converts the moun- 
tains into an ^olian harp, — and this super- 
natural tiralira restores to him the Dorian 
mythology, Apollo, Diana, and all divine 
hunters and huntresses. Can a musical note 
be so lofty, so haughtily beautiful! To the 
poor young poet, thus fabulous is his picture 
of society ; he is loyal ; he respects the rich ; 
they are rich for the sake of his imagination ; 
how poor his fancy would be, if they were 
not rich! That they have some high-fenced 
grove which they call a park ; that they live 
in larger and better-garnished saloons than 
90 



Nature 

he has visited, and go in coaches, keeping 
only the society of the elegant, to ^watering- 
places and to distant cities, — these make the 
groundwork from which he has dehneated 
estates of romance, compared with which 
their actual possessions are shanties and 
paddocks. The muse herself betrays her son, 
and enhances the gifts of wealth and well- 
born beauty by a radiation out of the air, 
and clouds, and forests that skirt the road, — 
a certain haughty favor, as if from patrician 
genii to patricians, a kind of aristocracy in 
nature, a prince of the power of the air. 

The moral sensibility which makes Edens 
and Tempes so easily, may not be always 
found, but the material landscape is never 
far off. We can find these enchantments 
v^ithout visiting the Como Lake, or the 
Madeira Islands. We exaggerate the praises 
of local scenery. In every landscape the 
point of astonishment is the meeting of the 
sky and the earth, and that is seen from 
the first hillock as \vell as from the top of the 
Alleghanies. The stars at night stoop down 
over the brownest, homeliest common with 
all the spiritual magnificence ^which they shed 
on the Campagna, or on the marble deserts 
of Eg3^pt. The uproUed clouds and the colors 
of morning and evening will transfigure 
maples and alders. The difference between 
landscape and landscape is small, but there 
is great difference in the beholders. There is 
91 



Emerson 

nothing so wonderful in any particular land- 
scape as the necessity of being beautiful 
under which every landscape lies. Nature 
cannot be surprised in undress. Beauty 
breaks in everywhere. 

But it is very easy to outrun the sympathy 
of readers on this topic, which schoolmen 
called natura naturata, or nature passive. 
One can hardly speak directly of it without 
excess. It is as easy to broach in mixed 
companies what is called '^the subject of re- 
ligion." A susceptible person does not like to 
indulge his tastes in this kind without the 
apology of some trivial necessity: he goes to 
see a wood-lot, or to look at the crops, or 
to fetch a plant or a mineral from a remote 
locality, or he carries a fowling-piece or a 
fishing-rod. I suppose this shame must have 
a good reason. A dilettantism in nature is 
barren and unworthy. The fop of fields is no 
better than his brother of Broadway. Men 
are naturally hunters and inquisitive of 
v^ood-craft, and I suppose that such a gazet- 
teer as wood-cutters and Indians should 
furnish facts for, would take place in the 
most sumptuous drawing-rooms of all the 
^Wreaths" and ^'Flora's chaplets'^ of the 
bookshops; yet ordinarily, whether we are 
too clumsy for so subtle a topic, or from 
v^hatever cause, as soon as men begin to 
write on nature, they fall into euphuism. 
Frivolity is a most unfit tribute to Pan, who 
92 



Nature 

ought to be represented in the mythology as 
the most continent of gods. I would not be 
frivolous before the admirable reserve and 
prudence of time, yet I cannot renounce the 
right of returning often to this old topic. 
The multitude of false churches accredits the 
true religion. Literature, poetry, science are 
the homage of man to this unfathomed se- 
cret, concerning w^hich no sane man can affect 
an indifierence or incuriosity. Nature is loved 
by what is best in us. It is loved as the 
city of God, although, or rather because 
there is no citizen. The sunset is unlike any- 
thing that is underneath it: it ^^ants men. 
And the beauty of nature must always seem 
unreal and mocking, until the landscape has 
human figures that are as good as itself If 
there were good men, there would never be 
this rapture in nature. If the king is in the 
palace, nobody looks at the walls. It is 
when he is gone, and the house is filled with 
grooms and gazers, that we turn from the 
people to find relief in the majestic men that 
are suggested by the pictures and the archi- 
tecture. The critics ^who complain of the 
sickly separation of the beauty of nature 
from the thing to be done, must consider 
that our hunting of the picturesque is insep- 
arable from our protest against false societ}^. 
Man is fallen; nature is erect, and serves as 
a differential thermometer, detecting the 
presence or absence of the divine sentiment 
93 



Emerson 

in man. By fault of our dulness and selfish- 
ness we are looking up to nature, but when 
w^e are convalescent, nature will look up to 
us. We see the foaming brook with com- 
punction: if our own life flowed with the 
right energy, we should shame the brook. 
The stream of zeal sparkles with real fire, 
and not with reflex rays of sun and moon. 
Nature may be as selfishly studied as trade. 
Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology ; 
psychology, mesmerism (with intent to show 
where our spoons are gone) ; and anatomy 
and physiology become phrenology and 
palmistry. 

But taking timely warning, and leaving 
many things unsaid on this topic, let us no 
longer omit our homage to the Efiicient 
Nature, natura naturans, the quick cause be- 
fore ^vhich all forms flee as the driven snows ; 
itself secret, its works driven before it in 
flocks and multitudes, (as the ancients repre- 
sented nature by Proteus, a shepherd,) and 
in undescribable varietj^. It publishes itself 
in creatures, reaching firom particles and 
spicule through transformation on trans- 
formation to the highest symmetries, arriv- 
ing at consummate results without a shock 
or a leap. A little heat, that is a little mo- 
tion, is all that differences the bald, dazzling 
white and deadly cold poles of the earth 
fi-om the prolific tropical climates. All 
changes pass without violence, by reason of 
94 



Nature 

the two cardinal conditions of boundless 
space and boundless time. Geology has ini- 
tiated us into the secularity of nature, and 
taught us to disuse our dame-school meas- 
ures, and exchange our Mosaic and Ptolemaic 
schemes for her large style. We knew noth- 
ing rightly, for want of perspective. Now we 
learn ^what patient periods must round them- 
selves before the rock is formed ; then before 
the rock is broken, and the first lichen race 
has disintegrated the thinnest external plate 
into soil, and opened the door for the remote 
Flora, Fauna, Ceres, and Pomona to come 
in. Ho^^ far off yet is the trilobite ! hov^^ far 
the quadruped ! how inconceivably remote is 
man! All duly arrive, and then race after 
race of men. It is a long way from granite 
to the oyster; farther yet to Plato and the 
preaching of the immortality of the soul. 
Yet all must come, as surely as the first 
atom has two sides. 

Motion or change and identity or rest are 
the first and second secrets of nature: — 
Motion and Rest. The whole code of her 
laws may be written on the thumbnail, or 
the signet of a ring. The whirling bubble on 
the surface of a brook admits us to the 
secret of the mechanics of the sky. Every 
shell on the beach is a key to it. A little 
water made to rotate in a cup explains the 
formation of the simpler shells ; the addi- 
tion of matter from year to year arrives at 
95 



Emerson 

last at the most complex forms ; and jet so 
poor is nature with all her craft, that from 
the beginning to the end of the universe she 
has but one stuff, — but one stuff with its two 
ends, to serve up all her dream-like variety. 
Compound it how she will, star, sand, fire, 
water, tree, man, it is still one stuff, and be- 
trays the same properties. 

Nature is always consistent, though she 
feigns to contravene her own laws. She 
keeps her laws, and seems to transcend them. 
She arms and equips an animal to find its 
place and living in the earth, and at the 
same time she arms and equips another ani- 
mal to destroy it. Space exists to divide 
creatures ; but by clothing the sides of a bird 
with a few feathers she gives him a petty 
omnipresence. The direction is forever on- 
ward, but the artist still goes back for 
materials and begins again with the first 
elements on the most advanced stage : other- 
wise all goes to ruin. If we look at her 
v^ork, we seem to catch a glance of a system 
in transition. Plants are the young of the 
world, vessels of health and vigor; but they 
grope ever upward toward consciousness; 
the trees are imperfect men, and seem to be- 
moan their imprisonment, rooted in the 
ground. The animal is the novice and pro- 
bationer of a more advanced order. The 
men, though young, having tasted the first 
drop from the cup of thought, are already 
96 



Nature 

dissipated : the maples and ferns are still un- 
corrupt; jet no doubt when thej come to 
consciousness the\^ too will curse and swear. 
Flowers so strictly belong to youth that we 
adult men soon come to feel that their beau- 
tiful generations concern not us : we have had 
our da\^; now let the children have theirs. 
The flowers jilt us, and \ve are old bachelors 
wath our ridiculous tenderness. 

Things are so strictly related, that accord- 
ing to the skill of the eye, from any one 
object the parts and properties of any other 
may be predicted. If we had eyes to see it, 
a bit of stone from the c^ty wall would 
certif}^ us of the necessity that man must 
exist, as readily as the city. That identity 
makes us all one, and reduces to nothing 
great intervals on our customary scale. 
We talk of deviations from natural life, as if 
artificial life were not also natural. The 
smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of 
a palace has an animal nature, rude and ab- 
original as a white bear, omnipotent to its 
own ends, and is directly related, there amid 
essences and billetsdoux, to Himmaleh moun- 
tain-chains and the axis of the globe. If we 
consider how much we are nature's, we need 
not be superstitious about towns, as if that 
terrific or benefic force did not find us there 
also, and fashion cities. Nature, who made 
the mason, made the house. We may easily 
hear too much of rural influences. The cool 
7 97 



Emerson 

disengaged air of natural objects makes them 
enviable to us, chafed and irritable creatures 
with red faces, and we think we shall be as 
grand as they if we camp out and eat roots; 
but let us be men instead of woodchucks and 
the oak and the elm shall gladly serve us, 
though we sit in chairs of ivory on carpets 
of silk. 

This guiding identity runs through all the 
surprises and contrasts of the piece, and 
characterizes every law. Man carries the 
world in his head, the whole astronomy and 
chemistry suspended in a thought. Because 
the history of nature is charactered in his 
brain, therefore is he the prophet and dis- 
coverer of her secrets. Every kno^m fact in 
natural science w^as divined by the presenti- 
ment of somebody, before it v^^as actually 
verified. A man does not tie his .shoe v>4th- 
out recognizing la^vs which bind the farthest 
regions of nature: moon, j)lant, gas, crystal, 
are concrete geometry and numbers. Com- 
mon sense knows its own, and recognizes the 
fact at first sight in chemical experiment. 
The common sense of Franklin, Dalton, Davy 
and Black, is the same common sense which 
made the arrangements which no^^ it dis- 
covers. 

If the identity expresses organized rest, the 

counter action runs also into organization. 

The astronomers said, *'Give us matter and a 

little motion and we will construct the uni- 

98 



Nature 

verse. It is not enough that we should have 
matter, we must also have a single impulse, 
one shove to launch the mass and generate 
the harmony of the centrifugal and centrip- 
etal forces. Once heave the ball from the 
hand, and we can show how all this mighty 
order grew." — "A very unreasonable postu- 
late," said the metaphysicians, ''and a plain 
begging of the question. Could you not 
prevail to know the genesis of projec- 
tion, as well as the continuation of it?" 
Nature, meanwhile, had not waited for the 
discussion, but, right or wrong, bestowed 
the impulse,' and the balls rolled. It was no 
great affair, a mere push, but the astrono- 
mers were right in making much of it, for 
there is no end to the consequences of the 
act. That famous aboriginal push propa- 
gates itself through all the balls of the sys- 
tem, and through every atom of ever\^ ball ; 
through all the races of creatures, and 
through the history and performances of 
every individual. Exaggeration is in the 
course of things. Nature sends no creature, 
no man into the world without adding a 
small excess of his proper quality. Given the 
planet it is still necessary to add the im- 
pulse; so to every creature nature added a 
little violence of direction in its proper path, 
a shove to put it on its wa\^; in every in- 
stance a slight generosity, a drop too much. 
Without electricity the air would rot, and 
99 
L.ofC. 



Emerson 

without this violence of direction which men 
and Avomen have, without a spice of bigot 
and fanatic, no excitement, no efficiency. 
We aim above the mark to hit the mark. 
Every act hath some falsehood of exaggera- 
tion in it. And when now and then comes 
along some sad, sharp-eyed man, who sees 
how paltry a game is played, and refuses to 
play but blabs the secret ; — how then? Is the 
bird flown? no, the ^vary Nature sends a 
new troop of fairer forms, of lordlier youths, 
with a little more excess of direction to hold 
them fast to their several aim ; makes them a 
little wrong-headed in that direction in Avhich 
they are rightest, and on goes the game 
again wdth new whirl, for a generation or 
two more. The child with his sweet pranks, 
the fool of his senses, commanded by every 
sight and sound, without any power to com- 
pare and rank his sensations, abandoned to 
a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dra- 
goon or a gingerbread-dog, individualizing 
everything, generalizing nothing, delighted 
w4th every new thing, lies down at night 
overpowered by the fatigue which this day 
of continual pretty madness has incurred. 
But nature has answered her purpose with 
the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked 
every faculty, and has secured the symmetri- 
cal growth of the bodily frame by all these 
attitudes and exertions, — an end of the first 
importance, which could not be trusted to 
100 



Nature 

any care less perfect than her own. This 
ghtter, this opaline lustre plays round the 
top of every to\^ to his eye to insure his 
fidelity, and he is deceived to his good. We 
are made alive and kept alive by the same 
arts. Let the stoics say ^vhat they please, 
we do not eat for the good of living, but 
because the meat is savory and the appetite 
is keen. The vegetable hfe does not content 
itself with casting from the flower or the tree 
a single seed, but it fills the air and earth 
v^ith a prodigality" of seeds, that, if thou- 
sands perish, thousands may plant them- 
selves; that hundreds maj- come up, that 
tens may five to maturity ; that at least one 
may replace the parent. All things betray 
the same calculated profusion. The excess of 
fear with which the animal fi-ame is hedged 
round, shrinking from cold, starting at sight 
of a snake or at a sudden noise, protects us, 
through a multitude of groundless alarms, 
from some one real danger at last. The 
lover seeks in marriage his private felicity 
and perfection, \vith no prospective end ; and 
nature hides in his happiness her owm end, 
namely progeny, or the perpetuity of the 
race. 

But the craft wath which the world is 
made, runs also into the mind and character 
of men. No man is quite sane; each has a 
vein of folly in his composition, a slight de- 
termination of blood to the head, to make 
101 



Emerson 

sure of holding him hard to some one point 
which nature had taken to heart. Great 
causes are never tried on their merits; but 
the cause is reduced to particulars to suit the 
size of the partisans, and the contention is 
ever hottest on minor matters. Not less re- 
markable is the overfaith of each man in the 
importance of what he has to do or say. 
The poet, the prophet, has a higher value for 
what he utters than any hearer, and there- 
fore it gets spoken. The strong, self-compla- 
cent Luther declares with an emphasis not to 
be mistaken, that ^^God himself cannot do 
without ^ase men." Jacob Behmen and 
George Fox betra\^ their egotism in the perti- 
nacity of their controversial tracts, and 
James Naylor once suffered himself to be 
vt^orshipped as the Christ. Each prophet 
comes presently to identify himself with his 
thought, and to esteem his hat and shoes 
sacred. However this may discredit such 
persons v^ith the judicious, it helps them 
v^dth the people, as it gives heat, pungenc}^, 
and publicity to their words. A similar ex- 
perience is not infrequent in private life. 
Bach young and ardent person writes a 
diary, in which, when the hours of pra^^er 
and penitence arrive, he inscribes his soul. 
The pages thus written are to him burning 
and fragrant ; he reads them on his knees by 
midnight and by the morning star ; he wets 
them with his tears; they are sacred; too 
102 



Nature 

good for the \vorld, and hardh^ jet to be 
shown to the dearest friend. This is the 
manchild that is born to the soul, and her 
life still circulates in the babe. The umbilical 
cord has not yet been cut. After some time 
has elapsed, he begins to "wish to admit his 
friend to this hallowed experience, and with 
hesitation, vet with firmness, exposes the 
pages to his eye. Will they not burn his 
eyes? The friend coldly turns them over, and 
passes from the writing to conversation, 
with easy transition, which strikes the other 
party with astonishment and vexation. He 
cannot susjDCct the writing itself Days and 
nights of fervid life, of communion with 
angels of darkness and of light have engraved 
their shadowy characters on that tear- 
stained book. He suspects the intelligence or 
the heart of his friend. Is there then no 
friend? He cannot yet credit that one may 
have impressive experience and yet may not 
know how to put his private fact into litera- 
ture : and perhaps the discovery that vrisdom 
has other tongues and ministers than ^ve, 
that though ^^e should hold our peace the 
truth w^ould not the less be spoken, might 
check injuriously the flames of our zeal. A 
man can only speak so long as he does not 
feel his speech to be partial and inadequate. 
It is partial, but he does not see it to be so 
whilst he utters it. As soon as he is released 
from the instinctive and particular and sees 
103 



Emerson 

its partiality, he shuts his mouth in disgust. 
For no man can write anything who does 
not think that wdiat he writes is for the time 
the history of the world ; or do anything well 
who does not esteem his work to be of im^- 
portance. My work may be of none, but I 
must not think it of none, or I shall not do 
it with impunity. 

In like manner there is throughout nature 
something mocking, something that leads us 
on and on, but arrives nowhere; keeps no 
faith ^th us. All promise outruns the per- 
formance. We live in a system of approx- 
imations. Every end is prospective of some 
other end, which is also temporary ; a round 
and final success nowhere. We are encamped 
in nature, not domesticated. Hunger and 
thirst lead us on to eat and to drink; but 
bread and wine, mix and cook them how 
you will, leave us hungry and thirsty, after 
the stomach is full. It is the same with all 
our arts and performances. Our music, our 
poetry, our language itself are not satis- 
factions, but suggestions. The hunger for 
wealth, which reduces the planet to a gar- 
den, fools the eager pursuer. What is the end 
sought? Plainly to secure the ends of good 
sense and beauty from the intrusion of de- 
formity or vulgarity of any kind. But what 
an operose method ! What a train of means 
to secure a little conversation ! This palace 
of brick and stone, these servants, this kitch- 
104 



Nature 

en, these stables, horses and equipage, this 
bank-stock and file of mortgages ; trade to 
all the world, country-house and cottage by 
the waterside, all for a little conversation, 
high, clear, and spiritual! Could it not be 
had as well bj beggars on the highway? 
No, all these things came from successive 
efforts of these beggars to remove friction 
from the ^vheels of life, and give opportunity. 
Conversation, character, were the avowed 
ends; wealth was good as it appeased the 
animal cravings, cured the smoky chimne}^, 
silenced the creaking door, brought friends 
together in a ^varm and quiet room, and 
kept the children and the dinner-table in 
a difierent apartment. Thought, virtue, 
beauty, were the ends; but it was known 
that men of thought and virtue sometimes 
had the headache, or wet feet, or could lose 
good time whilst the room was getting 
warm in winter da\^s. Unluckily, in the ex- 
ertions necessary to remove these inconve- 
niences, the main attention has been diverted 
to this object; the old aims have been lost 
sight of, and to remove friction has come to 
be the end. That is the ridicule of rich men; 
and Boston, London, Vienna, and now the 
governments generally of the vt^orld are cities 
and governments of the rich; and the masses 
are not men, hut poor men, that is, men who 
would be rich ; this is the ridicule of the class, 
that they arrive with pains and sweat and 
105 



Emerson 

fur J nowhere; when all is done, it is for 
nothing. Thej are like one who has inter- 
rupted the conversation of a company to 
make his speech, and no^w has forgotten 
what he went to say. The appearance 
strikes the eye everj^where of an aimless 
society, of aimless nations. Were the ends of 
nature so great and cogent as to exact this 
immense sacrifice of men? 

Quite analogous to the deceits in life, there 
is, as might be expected, a similar effect on 
the eye from the face of external nature. 
There is in v^oods and vt^aters a certain en- 
ticement and flattery, together with a failure 
to yield a present satisfaction. This disap- 
pointment is felt in every landscape. I have 
seen the softness and beauty of the summer 
clouds floating feathery overhead, enjoying, 
as it seemed, their height and privilege of 
motion, whilst yet they appeared not so 
much the drapery of this place and hour, as 
forelooking to some pavilions and gardens of 
festivity beyond. It is an odd jealousy, but 
the poet finds himself not near enough to his 
object. The pine-tree, the river, the bank 
of flowers before him does not seem to be 
nature. Nature is still else^^here. This or 
this is but outskirt and far-off' reflection and 
echo of the triumph that has passed by and 
is now at its glancing splendor and heyday, 
perchance in the neighboring fields, or, if you 
stand in the field, then in the adjacent woods. 
. 106 



Nature 

The present object shall give you this sense 
of stillness that follows a pageant which has 
just gone bj. What splendid distance, v^^hat 
recesses of ineffable pomp and loveliness in 
the sunset ! But who can go ^vhere they are^ 
or lay his hand or plant his foot thereon? 
Off they fall from the round world forever 
and ever. It is the same among the men and 
y^^omen as among the silent trees ; always a 
referred existence, an absence, never a pres- 
ence and satisfaction. Is it that beauty can 
never be grasped? in persons and in land- 
scape is equally inaccessible? The accepted 
and betrothed lover has lost the wildest 
charm of his maiden in her acceptance of him. 
She was heaven whilst he pursued her as a 
star : she cannot be heaven if she stoops to 
such a one as he. 

What shall we say of this omnipresent ap- 
pearance of that first projectile impulse, of 
this flattery and balking of so man\" well- 
meaning creatures? Must we not suppose 
somewhere in the universe a slight treachery 
and derision? Are we not engaged to a seri- 
ous resentment of this use that is made of 
us? Are we tickled trout, and fools of na- 
ture? One look at the face of heaven and 
earth lays all petulance at rest, and soothes 
us to wiser convictions. To the intelligent 
nature converts itself into a vast promise, 
and will not be rashly explained. Her secret 
is untold. Many and many an CEdipus ar- 
107 



Emerson 

rives; he has the whole mystery teeming in 
his brain. Alas ! the same sorcery has spoiled 
his skill; no syllable can he shape on his 
lips. Her mighty orbit vaults like the fresh 
rainbow into the deep, but no archangel's 
wing was yet strong enough to follow it and 
report of the return of the curve. But it also 
appears that our actions are seconded and 
disposed to greater conclusions than we de- 
signed. We are escorted on every hand 
through life by spiritual agents, and a benefi- 
cent purpose lies in wait for us. We cannot 
bandy words writh Nature, or deal with her 
as we deal wath persons. If we measure our 
individual forces against hers we may easily 
feel as if we were the sport of an insuperable 
destiny. But if, instead of identifying our- 
selves with the w^ork, we feel that the soul 
of the w^orkman streams through us ^^e shall 
find the peace of the morning d^welling first 
in our hearts, and the fathomless powers of 
gravity and chemistry, and, over them, of 
life, preexisting within us in their highest 
form. 

The uneasiness which the thought of our 
helplessness in the chain of causes occasions 
us, results from looking too much at one con- 
dition of nature, namely, Motion. But the 
drag is never taken from the wheel. Wher- 
ever the impulse exceeds, the Rest or Identity 
insinuates its compensation. All over the 
wide fields of earth grows the prunella or 
108 



Nature 

self-heal. After every foolish day we sleep 
off the fumes and furies of its hours; and 
though we are always engaged with par- 
ticulars, and often enslaved to them, ^^e 
bring with us to every experiment the innate 
universal laws. These, while they exist in 
the mind as ideas, stand around us in nature 
forever embodied, a present sanity to expose 
and cure the insanity of men. Our servitude 
to particulars betrays us into a hundred 
foolish expectations. We anticipate a new- 
era from the invention of a locomotive, or a 
balloon; the new engine brings with it the 
old checks. They say that by electro-mag- 
netism your salad shall be grown from the 
seed whilst your fowl is roasting for dinner ; 
it is a symbol of our modern aims and en- 
deavors, of our condensation and accelera- 
tion of objects ; — but nothing is gained ; na- 
ture cannot be cheated; man's life is but 
seventy salads long, grow they swift or grow 
they slow. In these checks and impossibili- 
ties however we find our advantage, not less 
than in the impulses. Let the victory fall 
where it will, we are on that side. And the 
knowledge that we traverse the w^hole scale 
of being, from the centre to the poles of na- 
ture, and have some stake in every possi- 
bility^, lends that sublime lustre to death, 
which philosophy and religion have too out- 
wardly and literally striven to express in 
the popular doctrine of the immortality of the 
109 



Emerson 

soul. The reality is more excellent than the 
report. Here is no ruin, no discontinuity, no 
spent ball. The divine circulations never rest 
nor linger. Nature is the incarnation of a 
thought, and turns to a thought again, as 
ice becomes water and gas. The ^^orld is 
mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is 
forever escaping again into the state of free 
thought. Hence the virtue and pungency of 
the influence on the mind of natural objects, 
whether inorganic or organized. Man im- 
prisoned, man crystallized, man vegetative, 
speaks to man impersonated. That power 
which does not respect quantity, which 
makes the whole and the particle its equal 
channel, delegates its smile to the morning, 
and distils its essence into every drop of rain. 
Every moment instructs, and every object; 
for wisdom is infused into every form. It 
has been poured into us as blood; it con- 
vulsed us as pain ; it slid into us as pleasure ; 
it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or 
in days of cheerful labor ; we did not guess 
its essence until after a long time. 



110 



Spiritual Laws 



111 



SPIRITUAL LAWS. 

When the act of reflection takes place in the 
mind, when we look at ourselves in the light 
of thought, we discover that our life is em- 
bosomed in beaut\^ Behind us, as we go, all 
things assume pleasing forms, as clouds do 
far off. Not only things familiar and stale, 
but even the tragic and terrible are comely 
as they take their place in the pictures of 
memory. The river-bank, the weed at the 
Avater-side, the old house, the foolish person, 
however neglected in the passing, have a 
grace in the past. Even the corpse that has 
lain in the chambers has added a solemn 
ornament to the house. The soul will not 
know either deformity or pain. If in the 
hours of clear reason we should speak the 
severest truth, we should say that we had 
never made a sacrifice. In these hours the 
mind seems so great that nothing can be 
taken from us that seems much. All loss, 
all pain, is particular; the universe remains 
to the heart unhurt. Neither vexations nor 
calamities abate our trust. No man ever 
stated his griefs as lightly as he might. Al- 
low for exaggeration in the most patient and 
sorely ridden hack that ever v.'as driven. 
8 113 



Emerson 

For it is onh^ the finite that has wrought 
and suffered; the infinite Hes stretched in 
smiHng repose. 

The intellectual life may be kept clean and 
healthful if man will live the life of nature 
and not import into his mind difficulties 
which are none of his. No man need be per- 
plexed in his speculations. Let him do and 
say what strictly belongs to him, and though 
very ignorant of books, his nature shall not 
yield him any intellectual obstructions and 
doubts. Our young people are diseased with 
the theological problems of original sin, 
origin of evil, predestination and the like. 
These never presented a practical difficulty 
to any man, — never darkened across any 
man's road who did not go out of his way 
to seek them. These are the soul's mumps 
and measles and \vhooping-coughs, and those 
who have not caught them cannot describe 
their health or prescribe the cure. A simple 
mind will not kno^w these enemies. It is 
quite another thing that he should be able to 
give account of his faith and expound to an- 
other the theory of his self-union and free- 
dom. This requires rare gifts. Yet without 
this self-knowledge there may be a sylvan 
strength and integrity in that which he is. 
*'A few strong instincts and a few plain 
rules" suffice us. 

My will never gave the images in my mind 
the rank they now take. The regular course 
114 



Spiritual Laws 

of studies, the ^^ears of academical and pro- 
fessional education have not ^delded me bet- 
ter facts than some idle books under the 
bench at the Latin School. What we do not 
call education is more precious than that 
which we call so. We form no guess, at the 
time of receiving a thought, of its compara- 
tive value. And education often wastes its 
effort in attempts to thwart and balk this 
natural magnetism, which is sure to select 
w^hat belongs to it. 

In like manner our moral nature is vitiated 
by any interference of our will. People rep- 
resent virtue as a struggle, and take to 
themselves great airs upon their attainments, 
and the question is ever^^where vexed when 
a noble nature is commended, whether the 
man is not better who strives with tempta- 
tion. But there is no merit in the matter. 
Either God is there or he is not there. We 
love characters in proportion as they are im- 
pulsive and spontaneous. The less a man 
thinks or knows about his virtues the better 
we like him. Timoleon's A4ctories are the 
best victories, which ran and flowed like 
Homer's verses, Plutarch said. W'hen we see 
a soul whose acts are all regal, graceful and 
pleasant as roses, we must thank God that 
such things can be and are, and not turn 
sourly on the angel and say ^^ Crump is a 
better man with his grunting resistance to 
all his native devils." 

115 



Emerson 

Not less conspicuous is the preponderance 
of nature over will in all practical life. There 
is less intention in history than w^e ascribe to 
it. We impute deep-laid far-sighted plans to 
Caesar and Napoleon; but the best of their 
power was in nature, not in them. Men of 
an extraordinary success, in their honest 
moments, have ahvays sung ^^Not unto us, 
not unto us." According to the faith of their 
times the}^ have built altars to Fortune, or 
to Destiny, or to St. Julian. Their success 
lay in their parallelism to the course of 
thought, which found in them an unob- 
structed channel; and the wonders of which 
they were the visible conductors seemed to 
the eye their deed. Did the w4res generate 
the galvanism? It is even true that there 
was less in them on which they could reflect 
than in another; as the virtue of a pipe is 
to be smooth and hollow. That which 
externally seemed will and immovableness 
was willingness and self-annihilation. Could 
Shakspeare give a theory of Shakspeare? 
Could ever a man of prodigious mathemati- 
cal genius convey to others any insight into 
his methods? If he could communicate that 
secret it would instantly lose its exaggerated 
value, blending with the daylight and the 
vital energy the power to stand and to go. 

The lesson is forcibly taught by these ob- 
servations that our life might be much easier 
and simpler than we make it ; that the Avorld 
116 



Spiritual Laws 

might be a happier place than it is ; that 
there is no need of struggles, convulsions, 
and despairs, of the ^wringing of the hands 
and the gnashing of the teeth ; that we mis- 
create our oAvn evils. We interfere with the 
optimism of nature; for whenever v.^e get 
this vantage-ground of the past, or of a 
wiser mind in the present, we are able to 
discern that v^^e are begirt with laws which 
execute themselves. 

The face of external nature teaches the 
same lesson. Nature will not have us fret 
and fume. She does not like our benevolence 
or our learning much better than she likes 
our frauds and wars. When we come out of 
the caucus, or the bank, or the Abolition- 
convention, or the Temperance-meeting, or 
the Transcendental club into the fields and 
woods, she savs to us, ''So hot? mv little 
Sir." 

We are full of mechanical actions. We must 
needs intermeddle and have things in our 
own Avay, until the sacrifices and virtues of 
society are odious. Love should make jov; 
but our benevolence is unhappv. Our Sun- 
da\^-schools and churches and pauper-soci- 
eties are yokes to the neck. We pain our- 
selves to please nobody. There are natural 
Avays of arriving at the same ends at \vhich 
these aim, but do not arrive. Wh\^ should 
all virtue work in one and the same way? 
Why should all eive dollars? It is verv in- 
117 



Emerson 

convenient to us country folk, and we do 
not think any good will come of it. We have 
not dollars, mercliants have; let them give 
them. Farmers wall give corn; poets will 
sing; women will se^w; laborers will lend a 
hand; the children will bring flowers. And 
■why drag this dead weight of a Sunday- 
school over the whole Christendom? It is 
natural and beautiful that childhood should 
inquire and maturity should teach ; but it is 
time enough to answer questions \vhen they 
are asked. Do not shut up the young people 
against their will in a pew and force the 
children to ask them questions for an hour 
against their Avill. 

If we look vender, things are all alike; laws 
and letters and creeds and modes of living 
seem a travesty of truth. Our societ\^ is en- 
cumbered b\^ ponderous machiner\^, which 
resembles the endless aqueducts \vhich the 
Romans built over hill and dale and w^hich 
are superseded by the discovery of the law 
that w^ater rises to the level of its source. 
It is a Chinese wall which any nimble Tartar 
can leap over. It is a standing arni}^, not so 
good as a ^^eace. It is a graduated, titled, 
richly appointed empire, quite superfluous 
when town-meetings are found to answer 
just as well. 

Let us draw a lesson from naiure, Avhich 
always works b\^ short ways. When the 
firuit is ripe, it falls. When the fruit is des- 
118 



Spiritual Laws 

patched, the leaf falls. The circuit of the 
waters is mere falling. The walking of man 
and all animals is a falling forwardo All our 
manual labor and works of strength, as pry- 
ing, splitting, digging, rowing and so forth, 
are done by dint of continual falling, and 
the globe, earth, moon, comet, sun, star, fall 
forever and ever. 

The simphcity of the universe is very dif- 
ferent from the sim]3licity of a machine. He 
who sees m.oral nature out and out and thor- 
oughly knows how knowledge is acquired 
and character formed, is a pedant. The sim- 
plicity of nature is not that w^hich may 
easily be read, but is inexhaustible. The last 
analysis can no wise be made. We judge of 
a man's wisdom by his hope, knowing that 
the perception of the inexhaustibleness of 
nature is an immortal youth. The wild fer- 
tility of nature is felt in comparing our rigid 
names and reputations ^th our fluid con- 
sciousness. We pass in the world for sects 
and schools, for erudition and piet\^, and we 
are all the time jejune babes. One sees very 
w^ell hoAv Pyrrhonism grew up. Every man 
sees that he is that middle point whereof 
every thing may be affirmed and denied vrith 
equal reason. He is old, he is young, he is 
very wise, he is altogether ignorant. He 
hears and feels w^hat yoti say of the sera- 
phim, and of the tin-peddler. There is no 
permanent wise man except in the figment of 
119 



Emerson 

the Stoics. We side with the hero, as we 
read or paint, against the coward and the 
robber; but we have been ourselves that 
coward and robber, and shall be again, — not 
in the low circumstance, but in comparison 
with the grandeurs possible to the soul. 

A little consideration of what takes place 
around us every day w^ould shov^^ us that a 
higher law than that of our will regulates 
events; that our painful labors are unneces- 
sary and fruitless; that only in our easy, 
simple, spontaneous action are we strong, 
and by contenting ourselves with obedience 
Ave become divine. Belief and love, — a be- 
lieving love will relieve us of a vast load of 
care. O my brothers, God exists. There is 
a soul at the centre of nature and over the 
will of every man, so that none of us can 
wrong the universe. It has so infused its 
strong enchantment into nature that we 
prosper w-hen we accept its advice, and when 
we struggle to ^'^ound its creatures our 
hands are glued to our sides, or they beat 
our own breasts. The v^^hole course of things 
goes to teach us faith. We need only obey. 
There is guidance for each of us, and by 
lowly listening we shall hear the right word. 
Why need you choose so painfully your place 
and occupation and associates and modes 
of action and of entertainment? Certainly 
there is a possible right for you that pre- 
cludes the need of balance and walful election. 
120 



Spiritual Laws 

For 3^ou there is a reality, a fit place and 
congenial duties. Place yourself in the mid- 
dle of the stream of power and wisdom 
which animates all whom it floats, and you 
are without eflbrt impelled to truth, to right 
and a perfect contentment. Then you put 
all gainsayers in the wrong. Then you are 
the world, the measure of right, of truth, of 
beauty. If we would not be mar-plots with 
our miserable interferences, the work, the 
society, letters, arts, science, religion of men 
\\rould go on far better than now, and the 
heaven predicted from the beginning of the 
Avorld, and still predicted from the bottom of 
the heart, would organize itself, as do now 
the rose and the air and the sun. 

I say, do not choose; but that is a figure 
of speech by which I would distinguish what 
is commonly called choice among men, and 
which is a partial act, the choice of the 
hands, of the eyes, of the appetites, and not a 
whole act of the man. But that which I call 
right or goodness, is the choice of my con- 
stitution ; and that which I call heaven, and 
inwardly aspire after, is the state or circum- 
stance desirable to my constitution; and the 
action which I in all my years tend to do, is 
the v^^ork for m.y faculties. We must hold a 
man amenable to reason for the choice of his 
daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse 
any longer for his deeds that they are the 
custom of his trade. What business has he 
121 



Emerson 

with an evil trade? Has he not a calling in 
his character? 

Each man has his own vocation. The 
talent is the call. There is one direction in 
which all space is open to him. He has 
faculties silently inviting him thither to end- 
less exertion. He is like a ship in a river ; he 
rtms against obstructions on every side but 
one, on that side all obstruction is taken 
awaj and he sweeps serenely over a deepen- 
ing channel into an infinite sea. This talent 
and this call depend on his organization, or 
the mode in ^which the general soul incar- 
nates itself in him. He inclines to do some- 
thing v^hich is easy to him and good when 
it is done, but ^which no other man can do. 
He has no rival. For the more truly he con- 
sults his own powers, the more difference will 
his work exhibit from the work of any 
other. His ambition is exactly proportioned 
to his powers. The height of the pinnacle 
is determined by the breadth of the base. 
Every man has this call of the power to do 
somewhat unique, and no man has any 
other call. The pretence that he has another 
call, a summons by name and personal elec- 
tion and outward ''signs that mark him ex- 
traordinary and not in the roll of common 
men,^' is fanaticism, and betrays obtuseness 
to perceive that there is one mind in all 
the individuals, and no respect of persons 
therein. 

122 



Spiritual Laws 

Bv doing his work he makes the need felt 
which he can supply, and creates the taste 
bv which he is enjoyed. By doing his own 
work he unfolds himself It is the vice of our 
public speaking that it has not abandon- 
ment. Somewhere, not only every orator 
but every man should let out all the length 
of all the reins ; should find or make a frank 
and hearty expression of v.^hat force and 
meaning is in him. The common experience 
is that the man fits himself as well as he can 
to the customary details of that work or 
trade he falls into, and tends it as a dog 
turns a spit. Then is he a part of the ma- 
chine he moves; the man is lost. Until he 
can manage to communicate himself to 
others in his full stature and proportion, he 
does not yet find his vocation. He must find 
in that an outlet for his character, so that 
he may justify his work to their eyes. If the 
labor is mean, let him by his thinking and 
character make it liberal. Whatever he 
knows and thinks, whatever in his apprehen- 
sion is worth doing, that let him communi- 
cate, or men will never know and honor 
him aright. Foolish, whenever you take the 
meanness and formality of that thing you 
do, instead of converting it into the obedient 
spiracle of your character and aims. 

We like only such actions as have already 
long had the praise of men, and do not per- 
ceive that anything man can do may be 
123 



Emerson 

divinely done. We think greatness entailed 
or organized in some places or duties, in cer- 
tain offices or occasions, and do not see that 
Paganini can extract rapture from a catgut, 
and Eulenstein from a jews-harp, and a 
nimble-fingered lad out of shreds of paper 
with his scissors, and Landseer out of s\vine, 
and the hero out of the pitiful habitation 
and company in Avhich he Avas hidden. What 
wre call obscure condition or vulgar society 
is that condition and society whose poetry 
is not yet written, but which you shall pres- 
ently make as enviable and renowned as any. 
In our estimates let us take a lesson from 
kings. The parts of hospitality, the connec- 
tion of families, the impressiveness of death, 
and a thousand other things, royalty makes 
its own estimate of, and a royal mind will. 
To make habitually a ne^v estimate, — that is 
elevation. 

What a man does, that he has. What has 
he to do with hope or fear? In himself is his 
might. Let him regard no good as solid but 
that which is in his nature and which must 
grow out of him as long as he exists. The 
goods of fortune may come and go like sum- 
mer leaves; let him scatter them on every 
wind as the momentary signs of his infinite 
productiveness. 

He may have his own. A man's genius, 
the quality that differences him from every 
other, the susceptibility to one class of in- 
124 



Spiritual Laws 

fluences, the selection of what is fit for him, 
the rejection of what is unfit, determines for 
him the character of the universe. A man 
is a method, a progressive arrangement; a 
selecting principle, gathering his like to him 
\vherever he goes. He takes only his own 
out of the multiplicity that sweeps and cir- 
cles round him. He is like one of those 
booms which are set out from the shore on 
rivers to catch drift-wood, or like the load- 
stone amongst splinters of steel. Those 
facts, \vords, persons, w^hich d^vell in his 
memory v.dthout his being able to say why, 
remain because they have a relation to him 
not less real for being as \^et unapprehended. 
They are symbols of value to him as they 
can interpret parts of his consciousness 
which he would vainly seek words for in the 
conventional images of books and other 
minds. What attracts my attention shall 
have it, as I will go to the man v^^ho knocks 
at my door, whilst a thousand persons as 
worthy go by it, to whom I give no regard. 
It is enough that these particulars speak to 
me. A few anecdotes, a few traits of charac- 
ter, manners, face, a fe^v incidents, have an 
emphasis in your memory out of all propor- 
tion to their apparent significance if you 
measure them by the ordinary standards. 
The\^ relate to your gift. Let them have 
their weight, and do not reject them and 
cast about for illustration and facts more 
125 



Emerson 

usual in literature. What jour heart thinks 
great, is great. The soul's emphasis is al- 
ways right. 

Over all things that are agreeable to his 
nature and genius the man has the highest 
right. Everywhere he may take what be- 
longs to his spiritual estate, nor can he take 
anything else though all doors w^ere open, 
nor can all the force o^ men hinder him from 
taking so much. It is vain to attempt to 
keep a secret from one who has a right to 
kno^vv it. It will tell itself. That mood into 
which a friend can bring us is his dominion 
over us. To the thoughts of that state of 
mind he has a right. All the secrets of that 
state of mind he can compel. This is a law 
which statesmen use in practice. All the 
terrors of the French Republic, Avhich held 
Austria in awe, w^ere unable to command her 
diplomacy. But Napoleon sent to Vienna 
M. de Narbonne, one of the old noblesse, 
with the morals, manners and name of that 
interest, saying that it was indispensable to 
send to the old aristocracy of Europe men of 
the same connection, which in fact consti- 
tutes a sort of free-masonry. M. de Nar- 
bonne in less than a fortnight penetrated all 
the secrets of the imperial cabinet. 

Nothing seems so easy as to speak and to 

be understood. Yet a man may come to find 

that the strongest of defences and of ties, — 

that he has been understood; and he who 

126 



oiritual Laws 

has received an opinion may come to find it 
the most inconvenient of bonds. 

If a teacher have any opinion which he 
-wishes to conceal, his pupils will become as 
fully indoctrinated into that as into any 
v^hich he publishes. If you pour water into 
a vessel twisted into coils and angles, it is 
vain to say, I will pour it onh^ into this or 
that; — it will find its level in all. Men feel 
and act the consequenees of your doctrine 
without being able to show how they follow. 
Show us an arc of the curve, and a good 
mathematician v^dll find out the whole figure. 
We are always reasoning from the seen to the 
unseen. Hence the perfect intelligence that 
subsists between v.4se men of remote ages. 
A man cannot bury his meanings so deep in 
his book but time and like-minded men will 
find them. Plato had a secret doctrine, had 
he? What secret can he conceal from the eyes 
of Bacon? of Montaigne? of Kant? Therefore 
Aristotle said of his vrorks, ''They are pub- 
lished and not published." 

No man can learn what he has not prepa- 
ration for learning, however near to his eyes 
is the object. A chemist m.ay tell his most 
precious secrets to a carpenter, and he shall 
be never the wiser, — the secrets he v^^ould not 
utter to a chemist for an estate. God screens 
us evermore from premature ideas. Our eyes 
are holden that we cannot see things that 
stare us in the face, until the hour arrives 
127 



Emerson 

T^hen the mind Is ripened; then we behold 
them, and the time when we saw them not 
is hke a dream. 

Not in nature but in man is all the beauty 
and worth he sees. The world is very empty, 
and is indebted to this gilding, exalting soul 
for all its pride. '^Earth fills her lap with 
splendors" not her own. The vale of Tempe, 
Tivoli and Rome are earth and water, rocks 
and sky. There are as good earth and water 
in a thousand places, yet how unafiecting ! 

People are not the better for the sun and 
moon, the horizon and the trees ; as it is not 
observed that the keepers of Roman galleries 
or the valets of painters have any elevation 
of thought, or that librarians are wiser men 
than others. There are graces in the de- 
meanor of a polished and noble person ^vhich 
are lost upon the eye of a churl. These are 
like the stars vv^hose light has not yet reached 
us. 

He may see what he maketh. Our dreams 
are the sequel of our waking knowledge. The 
visions of the night bear some proportion to 
the visions of the day. Hideous dreams are 
exaggerations of the sins of the day. We see 
our evil affections embodied in bad ph\^siog- 
nomies. On the Alps the traveller sometimes 
beholds his o^wn shadow magnified to a 
giant, so that every gesture of his hand is 
terrific. ''My children," said an old man to^ 
his boys scared by a figure in the dark entry, 
128 



Spiritual Laws 

*'Mj children, jou will never see anything 
worse than ^-^ourselves." As in dreams, so 
in the scarcely less fluid events of the world 
every man sees himself in colossal, without 
knowing that it is himself. The good, com- 
pared to the evil w^hich he sees, is as his own 
good to his own evil. Every quality of his 
mind is magnified in some one acquaintance, 
and every emotion of his heart in some one. 
He is like a quincunx of trees, which counts 
five, — east, west, north, or south; or an 
initial, medial, and terminal acrostic. And 
v^^hy not? He cleaves to one person and 
avoids another, according to their likeness or 
unlikeness to himself, truly seeking himself in 
his associates and moreover in his trade and 
habits and gestures and meats and drinks, 
and comes at last to be faithfully represented 
by every vie^v you take of his circumstances. 
He may read what he writes. What can 
we see or acquire but ^vhat ^ve are? You 
have observed a skilful man reading Virgil. 
Well, that author is a thousand books to a 
thousand persons. Take the book into your 
two hands and read \^our eyes out, you Avill 
never find what I find. If any ingenious 
reader vrould have a monopoly of the wis- 
dom or delight he gets, he is as secure now 
the book is Englished, as if it were impris- 
oned in the Pelews' tongue. It is with a 
good book as it is with good company. In- 
troduce a base person among gentlemen, it 
9 129 



Emerson 

is all to no purpose; he is not their fellow. 
Every society protects itself. The company 
is perfectly safe, and he is not one of them, 
though his body is in the room. 

What avails it to fight with the eternal 
laws of mind, which adjust the relation of all 
persons to each other by the mathematical 
measure of their havings and beings? Ger- 
trude is enamored of Guy; how high, how 
aristocratic, hoAv Roman his mien and man- 
ners! to live with him were life indeed, and 
no purchase is too great; and heaven and 
earth are moved to that end. Well, Gertrude 
has Guy; but what now avails how high, 
how aristocratic, how Roman his mien and 
manners, if his heart and aims are in the 
senate, in the theatre and in the billiard- 
room, and she has no aims, no conversation 
that can enchant her graceful lord? 

He shall have his own society. We can 
love nothing but nature. The most wonder- 
ful alents, the most meritorious exertions 
real, avail very little with us ; but nearness 
or like, ess of nature, — how beautiful is the 
ease of its victorj^! Persons approach us, 
far- 3US for their beauty, for their accomplish- 
ments, worthy of all wonder for their charms 
and gifts; they dedicate their whole skill to 
the hour and the company, — with very im- 
perfect result. To be sure it would be un- 
grateful in us not to praise them loudly. 
Then, when all is done, a person of related 
130 



Spiritual Laws 

mind, a brother or sister by nature, comes 
to us so softly and easily, so nearly and inti- 
mately, as if it were the blood in our proper 
veins, that we feel as if some one was gone, 
instead of another having come ; we are ut- 
terly relieved and refreshed; it is a sort of 
joyful solitude. We foolishly think in our 
days of sin that \\re must court friends by 
compliance to the customs of society, to its 
dress, its breeding, and its estimates. But 
only that soul can be my friend which I en- 
counter on the line of my own march, that 
soul to which I do not decline and which 
does not decline to me, but, native of the 
same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all 
my experience. The scholar forgets himself 
and apes the customs and costumes of the 
man of the world to deserve the smile of 
beauty, and follows some giddy girl, not yet 
taught by religious passion to know the 
noble ^voman with all that is serene, oracu- 
lar and beautiful in her soul. Let hv be 
great, and love shall follow him. N <ylnng 
is rnore deeply punished than the n^gi^ct of 
the affinities by which alone society should 
be formed, and the insane levity of choc ^ing 
associates by others' eyes. 

He may set his own rate. It is a maxim 
worthy of all acceptation that a man may 
have that allowance he takes. Take the 
place and attitude which belong to you, and 
all men acquiesce. The world must be just. 
131 



Emerson 

It leaves every man, with profound uncon- 
cern, to set his own rate. Hero or driveller, 
it meddles not in the matter. It will cer- 
tainly accept 3''our own measure of your do- 
ing and being, whether you sneak about and 
deny your owm name, or whether you see 
your work produced to the concave sphere 
of the heavens, one with the revolution of the 
stars. 

The same reality pervades all teaching. 
The man may teach by doing, and not other- 
^se. If he can communicate himself he can 
teach, but not by words. He teaches who 
gives, and he learns who receives. There is 
no teaching until the pupil is brought into 
the same state or principle in which you are ; 
a transfusion takes place ; he is you and you 
are he; then is a teaching, and by 1?'^ un- 
friendly chance or bad company can he ever 
quite lose the benefit. But your propositions 
run out of one ear as they ran in at the 
other. We see it advertised that Mr. Grand 
wall deliver an oration on the Fourth' of July, 
and Mr. Hand before the Mechanics' Associa- 
tion, and we do not go thither, because we 
know^ that these gentlemen will not com- 
municate their own character and experience 
to the company. If we had reason to ex- 
pect such a confidence \ve should go through 
all inconvenience and opposition. The sick 
would be carried in litters. But a public 
oration is an escapade, a non-committal, an 
132 



Spiritual Laws 

apology, a gag, and not a communication, 
not a speech, not a man. 

A like Nemesis presides over all intellectual 
works. We have 3^et to learn that the thing 
uttered in words is not therefore affirmed. 
It must affirm itself, or no forms of logic or 
of oath can give it evidence. The sentence 
must also contain its own apology for being 
spoken. 

The effect of any writing on the public 
mind is mathematically measurable by its 
depth of thought. How much water does it 
draw? If it awaken you to think, if it lift 
you from your feet with the great voice of 
eloquence, then the effect is to be ^de, slow, 
permanent, over the minds of men; if the 
pages instruct you not, they will die like flies 
in th t hour. The wa\^ to speak and write 
what shall not go out of fashion is to speak 
and write sincerely. The argument which 
has not power to reach my own practice, I 
may Az^^ell doubt w^ill fail to reach yours. 
But take Sidney's maxim: — ''Look in thy 
heart, and write." He that writes to him- 
self ^writes to an eternal public. That state- 
ment only is fit to be made public which you 
have come at in attempting to satisfy your 
own curiosity. The writer who takes his 
subject from his ear and not from his heart, 
should know that he has lost as much as he 
seems to have gained, and when the empty 
book has gathered all its praise, and half the 
133 



Emerson 

people say, 'What poetry! what genius!" it 
still needs fuel to make fire. That only prof- 
its ^^hich is profitable. Life alone can im- 
part life; and though we should burst ^we 
can only be valued as we make ourselves 
valuable. There is no luck in literary repu- 
tation. They who make up the final verdict 
upon every book are not the partial and 
noisy readers of the hour when it appears, 
but a court as of angels, a public not to be 
bribed, not to be entreated and not to be 
overa^ved, decides upon every man's title to 
fame. Only those books come down v^hich 
deserve to last. Gilt edges, vellum and mo- 
rocco, and presentation-copies to all the 
libraries will not preserve a book in circula- 
tion beyond its intrinsic date. It must go 
with all Walpole's Noble and Royal Authors 
to its fate. Blackmore, Kotzebue, or Pollok 
may endure for a night, but Moses and 
Homer stand forever. There are not in the 
world at any one time more than a dozen 
persons who read and understand Plato, — 
never enough to pay for an edition of his 
works; yet to every generation these come 
duly down, for the sake of those fe^v persons, 
as if God brought them in his hand. *'No 
book," said Bentley, ''was ever written doAvn 
by any but itself." The permanence of all 
books is fixed b}^ no effort, friendly or hostile, 
but by their own specific gravity, or the in- 
trinsic importance of their contents to the 
134 



Spiritual Laws 

constant mind of man. ''Do not trouble 
yourself too much about the Hght on your 
statue," said Michael Angelo to the young 
sculptor; ''the light of the public square will 
test its value." 

In like manner the effect of every action is 
measured by the depth of the sentiment from 
which it proceeds. The great man knew not 
that he was great. It took a century or t^wo 
for that fact to appear. What he did, he did 
because he must; it was the most natural 
thing in the world, and grew out of the cir- 
cumstances of the moment. But now% every- 
thing he did, even to the lifting of his finger 
or the eating of bread, looks large, all-re- 
lated, and is called an institution. 

These are the demonstrations in a few par- 
ticulars of the genius of nature ; they show 
the direction of the stream. But the stream 
is blood ; every drop is alive. Truth has not 
single victories; all things are its organs, — 
not only dust and stones, but errors and lies. 
The laws of disease, physicians say, are as 
beautiful as the laws of health. Our philoso- 
phy is afiirmative and readily accepts the 
testimony of negative facts, as every shadow 
points to the sun. By a divine necessity 
every fact in nature is constrained to offer 
its testimony. 

Human character evermore publishes itself 
The most fugitive deed and word, the mere 
air of doing a thing, the intimated purpose, 
135 



Emerson 

expresses character. If jou act yon show 
character ; if you sit still, if jou sleep, you 
show it. You think because jou have spoken 
nothing when others spoke, and have given 
no opinion on the times, on the church, on 
slavery, on marriage, on socialism, on secret 
societies, on the college, on parties and per- 
sons, that your verdict is still expected with 
curiosity as a reserved wisdom. Far other- 
T^ise; your silence answers very loud. You 
have no oracle to utter, and your fellow-men 
have learned that you cannot help them ; for 
oracles speak. Doth not Wisdom cry and 
Understanding put forth her voice? 

Dreadful limits are set in nature to the 
po^wers of dissimilation. Truth tyrannizes 
over the unwilling members of the body. 
Faces never lie, it is said. No man need be 
deceived who will study the changes of ex- 
pression. When a man speaks the truth in 
the spirit of truth, his eye is as clear as the 
heavens. W^hen he has base ends and speaks 
falsely, the eye is muddy and sometimes 
asquint. 

I have heard an experienced counsellor say 
that he never feared the effect upon a jury of 
a lawyer who does not believe in his heart 
that his client ought to have a verdict. If he 
does not believe it his unbelief will appear to 
the jur}^, despite all his protestations, and 
will become their unbelief This is that law 
whereby a work of art, of whatever kind, 
136 



Spiritual Laws 

sets us in the same state of mind wherein the 
artist was when he made it. That which we 
do not beheve we cannot adeqnately say, 
though we may repeat the words never so 
often. It was this conviction which Sweden- 
borg expressed when he described a group of 
persons in the spiritual world endeavoring in 
vain to articulate a proposition which they 
did not believe; but they could not, though 
they twisted and folded their lips even to 
indignation. 

A man passes for that he is worth. Very 
idle is all curiosity concerning other people's 
estimate of us, and all fear of remaining un- 
known is not less so. If a man know that 
he can do anything,~that he can do it better 
than any one else, — he has a pledge of the 
acknowledgment of that fact by all persons. 
The world is full of judgment-days, and into 
every assembly that a man enters, in every 
action he attempts, he is gauged and 
stamped. In every troop of boys that whoop 
and run in each yard and square, a new- 
comer is as well and accurately weighed in 
the .course of a few days and stamped with 
his right number, as if he had undergone a 
formal trial of his strength, speed and tem- 
per. A stranger comes from a distant school 
with better dress, with trinkets in his pock- 
ets, Avith airs and pretensions ; an older boy 
says to himself, "It's of no use; we shall find 
him out to-morrow." ''What has he done?" 
137 



Emerson 

is the divine question which searches men and 
transpierces every false reputation. A fop 
may sit in any chair of the world nor be 
distinguished for his hour from Homer and 
Washington; but there need never be any 
doubt colicerning the respective ability of 
human beings. Pretension may sit still, but 
cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act 
of real greatness. Pretension never w^rote an 
Iliad, nor drove back Xerxes, nor christian- 
ized the world, nor abolished slavery. 

As much virtue as there is, so much ap- 
pears ; as much goodness as there is, so much 
reverence it commands. x411 the devils re- 
spect virtue. The high, the generous, the 
self-devoted sect will always instruct and 
command mankind. Never was a sincere 
Avord utterly lost. Never a magnanimity fell 
to the ground, but there is some heart to 
greet and accept it unexpectedly. A man 
passes for that he is worth. What he is en- 
graves itself on his face, on his form, on his 
fortunes, in letters of light. Concealment 
avails him nothing, boasting nothing. There 
is confession in the glances of our eyes, in 
our smiles, in salutations, and the grasp of 
hands. His sin bedaubs him, mars all his 
good impression. Men know not why they 
do not trust him, but they do not trust him. 
His vice glasses his eye, cuts lines of mean 
expression in his cheek, pinches the nose, sets 
the mark of the beast on the back of the 
138 



Spiritual Laws 

head, and writes fool! fool! on the fore- 
head of a king. 

If you would not be kno\\^^n to do any 
thing, never do it. A man may play the fool 
in the drifts of a desert, but every grain of 
sand shall seem to see. He may be a soli- 
tary eater, but he cannot keep his foolish 
counsel. A broken complexion, a swinish 
look, ungenerous acts and the want of due 
knowledge, — all blab. Can a cook, a Chif- 
finch, an lachimo be mistaken for Zeno or 
Paul? Confucius exclaimed, — ''How can a 
man be concealed? Hovr can a man be con- 
cealed?" 

On the other hand, the hero fears not that 
if he withhold the avowal of a just and 
brave act it will go unwitnessed and unloved. 
One knows it, — himself, — and is pledged by it 
to sweetness of peace and to nobleness of 
aim w^hich will prove in the end a better 
proclamation of it than the relating of the 
incident. Virtue is the adherence in action 
to the nature of things, and the nature of 
things makes it prevalent. It consists in a 
perpetual substitution of being for seeming, 
and with sublime propriety God is described 
as saying, I AM. 

The lessons which these observations con- 
vey is. Be, and not seem. Let us acquiesce. 
Let us take our bloated nothingness out of 
the path of the divine circuits. Let us un- 
learn our wisdom of the world. Let us lie 
139 



Emerson 

low in the Lord's power and learn that 
truth alone makes rich and great. 

If you visit your friend, why need you 
apologize for not having visited him, and 
waste his time and deface your own act? 
Visit him now. Let him feel that the highest 
love has come to see him, in thee its lowest 
organ. Or why need you torment yourself 
and friend by secret self-reproaches that you 
have not assisted him or complimented him 
with gifts and salutations heretofore? Be a 
gift and a benediction. Shine with real light 
and not with the borrowed reflection of 
gifts. Common men are apologies for men; 
they bow the head, excuse themselves with 
prolix reasons, and accumulate appearances 
because the substance is not. 

We are full of these superstitions of sense, 
the Avorship of magnitude. We call the poet 
inactive, because he is not a president, a 
merchant or a porter. We adore an institu- 
tion, and do not see that it is founded on a 
thought which we have. But real action is 
in silent moments. The epochs of our life are 
not in the visible facts of our choice of a 
calling, our marriage, our acquisition of an 
oflice, and the like, but in a silent thought 
by the wayside as we \valk; in a thought 
which revises our entire manner of life and 
says, — 'Thus hast thou done, but it were 
better thus." And all our after years, like 
menials, serve and wait on this, and accord- 
140 



Spiritual Laws 

ing to their ability execute its will. This 
revisal or correction is a constant force, 
which, as a tendenc\^, reaches through our 
Hfetime. The object of the man, the aim of 
these moments, is to make daylight shine 
through him, to suffer the law to traverse 
his whole being without obstruction, so that 
on what point soever of his doing your eye 
falls it shall report truly of his character, 
whether it be his diet, his house, his religious 
forms, his society, his mirth, his vote, his 
opposition. Now he is not homogeneous, 
but heterogeneous, and the ray does not 
traverse ; there are no thorough lights, but 
the eye of the beholder is puzzled, detecting 
many unlike tendencies and a life not yet at 
one. 

Why should we make it a point with our 
false modesty to disparage that man we are 
and that form of being assigned to us? A 
good man is contented. I love and honor 
Epaminondas, but I do not wish to be 
Epaminondas. I hold it more just to love 
the world of this hour than the world of his 
hour. Nor can you, if I am true, excite me 
to the least uneasiness by saying, ^'He acted 
and thou sittest still." I see action to be 
good, when the need is, and sitting still to 
be also good. Epaminondas, if he was the 
man I take him for, would have sat still 
^th joy and peace, if his lot had been mine. 
Heaven is large, and affords space for all 
141 



* Emerson 

modes of love and fortitude. Why should we 
be busjbodies and superserviceable? Action 
and inaction are alike to the true. One piece 
of the tree is cut for a weathercock and one 
for the sleeper of a bridge ; the virtue of the 
wood is apparent in both. 

I desire not to disgrace the soul. The fact 
that I am here certainly shows me that the 
soul had need of an organ here. Shall I not 
assume the post? Shall I skulk and dodge 
and duck with my unseasonable apologies 
and vain modesty and imagine my being 
here impertinent? less pertinent than Epa- 
minondas or Homer being there? and that the 
soul did not knov^ its own needs? Besides, 
v^ithout any reasoning on the matter, I have 
no discontent. The good soul nourishes me 
and unlocks new magazines of power and en- 
joyment to me every day. I will not meanly 
decline the immensity of good, because I have 
heard that it has come to others in another 
shape. 

Besides, why should we be cowled by the 
name of Action? 'Tis a trick of the senses, — 
no more. We know that the ancestor of 
every action is a thought. The poor mind 
does not seem to itself to be anything unless 
it have an outside badge, — some Gentoo diet, 
of Quaker coat, or Calvinistic prayer-meet- 
ing, or philanthropic society, or a great do- 
nation or a high office, or, any how, some 
wild contrasting action to testify that it is 
142 



Spiritual Laws 

somewhat. The rich mind Hes in the sun and 
sleeps, and is Nature. To think is to act. 

Let us, if we must have great actions, 
make our own so. All action is of an in- 
finite elasticity, and the least admits of being 
inflated with the celestial air until it eclipses 
the sun and moon. Let us seek one peace by 
fidelity. Let me heed my duties. Why need 
I go gadding into the scenes and philosophy 
of Greek and Italian history before I have 
justified myself to my benefactors? How 
dare I read Washington's campaigns vv^hen I 
have not answered the letters of my own 
correspondents? Is not that a just objection 
to much of our reading? It is a pusillani- 
mous desertion of our work to gaze after 
our neighbors. It is peeping. Byron says 
of Jack Bunting, — 

**He knew not what to say, and so he swore." 

I may say it of our preposterous use of 
books, — He knew not what to do, and so he 
read. I can think of nothing to fill my time 
with, and I find the Life of Brant. It is a 
very extravagant compliment to pay to 
Brant, or to General Schuyler, or to General 
Washington. My time should be as good as 
their time, — my facts, my net of relations, as 
good as theirs, or either of theirs. Rather 
let me do my ^^ork so well that other idlers 
if they choose may compare my texture with 
143 



Emerson 

the texture of these and find it identical with 
the best. 

This over-estimate of the possibiHties of 
Paul and Pericles, this under-estimate of our 
own, comes from a neglect of the fact of an 
identical nature. Bonaparte knew but one 
merit, and rewarded in one and the same 
way the good soldier, the good astronomer, 
the good poet, the good player. The poet 
uses the names of C^sar, of Tamerlane, of 
Bonduca, of Belisarius ; the painter uses the 
conventional story of the Virgin Mary, of 
Paul, of Peter. He does not therefore defer 
to the nature of these accidental men, of 
these stock heroes. If the poet write a true 
drama, then he is Caesar, and not the player 
of Caesar; then the selfsame strain of 
thought, emotion as pure, wit as subtle, 
motions as swift, mounting, extravagant, 
and a heart as great, self-sufficing, dauntless, 
which on the waves of its love and hope can 
uplift all that is reckoned solid and precious 
in the world, — palaces, gardens, money, na- 
vies, kingdoms, — marking its own incompar- 
able worth by the slight it casts on these 
gauds of men; — these all are his, and by the 
power of these he rouses the nations. Let a 
man believe in God, and not in names and 
places and persons. Let the great soul in- 
carnated in some woman's form, poor and 
sad and single, in some Dolly or Joan, go 
out to service and sweep chambers and scour 
144 



Spiritual Laws 

floors, and its eflulgent daybeams cannot be 
mufiled or hid, but to sw^eep and scour will 
instantly appear supreme and beautiful ac- 
tions, the top and radiance of human life, 
and all people will get mops and brooms; 
until, lo ! suddenly the great soul has en- 
shrined itself in some other form and done 
some other deed, and that is now the flower 
and head of all living nature. 

We are the photometers, we the irritable 
gold-leaf and tinfoil that measure the accu- 
mulations of the subtle element. We know 
the authentic effects of the true fire through 
ever\^ one of its million disguises. 



10 



145 



The American Scholar 



147 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 

An Oration Delivered Before the Phi Beta 
Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 
1837. 

Mr. President and Gentlemen:— I greet 
you on the recommencement of our literary 
year. Our anniversary is one of hope, and, 
perhaps, not enough of labor. We do not meet 
for games of strength or skill, for the recita- 
tion of histories, tragedies, and odes, like the 
ancient Greeks ; for parliaments of love and 
poesy, like the Troubadours ; nor for the ad- 
vancement of science, like our contempora- 
ries in the British and European capitals. 
Thus far, our holiday has been simply a 
friendly sign of the survival of the love of 
letters amongst a people too busy to give to 
letters any more. As such it is precious as 
the sign of an indestructible instinct. Per- 
haps the time is already come w^hen it ought 
to be, and wall be, something else ; when the 
sluggard intellect of this continent Avill look 
from under its iron lids and fill the postponed 
expectation of the v^orld with something bet- 
ter than the exertions of mechanical skill. 
Our day of dependence, our long apprentice- 
ship to the learning of other lands, draws to 
149 



Emerson 

a close. The millions that around ns are 
rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the 
sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, 
actions arise, that must be sung, that will 
sing themselves. Who can doubt that poetry 
will revive and lead in a new age, as the star 
in the constellation Harp, which now flames 
in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall 
one day be the pole-star for a thousand 
years? 

In this hope I accept the topic which not 
only usage but the nature of our association 
seem to prescribe to this day, — the American 
Scholar. Year by year we come up hither to 
read one more chapter of his biography. Let 
us inquire what light new days and events 
have thrown on his character and his hopes. 

It is one of those fables w^hich out of an 
unknown antiquity convey an unlooked-for 
wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, 
divided Man into men, that he might be more 
helpful to himself; just as the hand was di- 
vided into fingers, the better to answer its 
end. 

The old fable covers a doctrine ever new 
and sublime ; that there is One Man, — present 
to all particular men only partially, or 
through one faculty ; and that you must take 
the whole society to find the whole man. 
Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an 
engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and 
scholar, and statesman, and producer, and 
150 



The American Scholar 

soldier. In the divided or social state these 
functions are parcelled out to individuals, 
each of whom aims to do his stint of the 
joint work, \vhilst each other performs his. 
The fable implies that the individual, to 
possess himself, must sometimes return from 
his own labor to embrace all the other 
laborers. But, unfortunately, this original 
unit, this fountain of power, has been so dis- 
tributed to multitudes, has been so minutely 
subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled 
into drops, and cannot be gathered. The 
state of society is one in which the members 
have suffered amputation from the trunk, 
and strut about so many walking monsters, 
— a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, 
but never a man. 

Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, 
into many things. The planter, who is Man 
sent out into the field to gather food, is sel- 
dom cheered by any idea of the true dignity 
of his ministry. He sees his bushel and his 
cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the 
farmer, instead of Man on the farm. The 
tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth 
to his work, but is ridden by the routine of 
his craft, and the soul is subject to dollars. 
The priest becomes a form; the attorney a 
statute-book; the mechanic a machine; the 
sailor a rope of the ship. 

In this distribution of functions the scholar 
is the delegated intellect. In the right state 
151 



Emerson 

he is Man Thinking, In the degenerate state, 
when the victim of society, he tends to be- 
come a mere thinker, or still worse, the par- 
rot of other men's thinking. 

In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the 
theory of hi^ office is contained. Him Nature 
solicits with all her placid, all her monitory 
pictures; him the past instructs; him the 
future invites. Is not indeed every man a 
student, and do not all things exist for the stu- 
dent's behoof? And, finally, is not the true 
scholar the only true master? But the old 
oracle said, ^'All things have two handles: 
beware of the wrong one." In life, too 
often, the scholar errs with mankind and 
forfeits his privilege. Let us see him in his 
school, and consider him in reference to the 
main influences he receives. 

I. The first in time and the first in im- 
portance of the influences upon the mind is 
that of nature. Every day, the sun; and, 
after sunset. Night and her stars. Ever the 
winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every 
day, men and women, conversing, beholding 
and beholden. The scholar is he of all men 
whom this spectacle most engages. He must 
settle its value in his mind. What is nature 
to him? There is never a beginning, there is 
never an end, to the inexplicable continuity 
of this web of God, but always circular 
power returning into itself Therein it re- 
152 



The American Scholar 

sembles his own spirit, \vhose beginning, 
whose ending, he never can find, — so entire, 
so boundless. Far too as her splendors 
shine, system on system shooting like rays, 
upward, downward, without centre, with- 
out circumference, — in the mass and in the 
particle. Nature hastens to render account of 
herself to the mind. Classification begins. 
To the young mind everything is individual, 
stands by itself. B\^ and by, it finds how to 
join two things and see in them one nature ; 
then three, then three thousand ; and so, 
tyrannized over by its o^wn unifying instinct, 
it goes on tying things together, diminishing 
anomalies, discovering roots running under 
ground whereby contrary and remote things 
cohere and flower out from one stem. It 
presently learns that since the dawn of his- 
tory there has been a constant accumulation 
and classifying of facts. But what is classi- 
fication but the perceiving that these objects 
are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but 
have a law which is also a law of the hu- 
man mind? The astronomer discovers that 
geometry, a pure abstraction of the human 
mind, is the measure of planetary motion. 
The chemist finds proportions and intelligi- 
ble method throughout matter; and science 
is nothing but the finding of analogy, iden- 
tity, in the most remote parts. The ambi- 
tious soul sits down before each refractory 
fact; one after another reduces all strange 
153 



Emerson 

constitutions, all new jDowers, to their class 
and their law, and goes on forever to ani- 
mate the last fibre of organization, the out- 
skirts of nature, bj insight. 

Thus to him, to this school-bo j under the 
bending dome of da\^, is suggested that he 
and it proceed from one root ; one is leaf and 
one is flow^er ; relation, sympathy, stirring in 
every vein. And what is that root? Is not 
that the soul of his soul? A thought too 
bold; a dream too wald. Yet when this 
spiritual light shall have revealed the law of 
more earthly natures, — when he has learned 
to w^orship the soul, and to see that the 
natural philosophy that now is, is only the 
first gropings of its gigantic hand, he shall 
look forward to an ever-expanding knoAvl- 
edge as to a becoming creator. He shall see 
that nature is the opposite of the soul, an- 
sw^ering to it part for part. One is seal and 
one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his 
own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own 
mind. Nature then becomes to him the 
measure of his attainments. So much of 
nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his 
own mind does he not yet possess. And, in 
fine, the ancient precejot, ^'Know thyself," 
and the modern precept, * 'Study nature," be- 
come at last one maxim. 

II. The next great influence into the spirit 
of the scholar is the mind of the past, — in 
whatever form, whether of literature, of 
154 



The American Scholar 

art, of institutions, that mind is inscribed. 
Books are the best type of the influence of the 
past, and perhaps we shall get at the truth, 
— learn the amount of this influence more 
conveniently, — by considering their value 
alone. 

The theory of books is noble. The scholar 
of the first age received into him the world 
around; brooded thereon; gave it the new 
arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it 
again. It came into him life; it went out 
from him truth. It came to him short-lived 
actions; it went out from him immortal 
thoughts. It came to him business ; it went 
from him poetry. It was dead fact ; now, it 
is quick thought. It can stand, and it can 
go. It now endures, it now flies, it now in- 
spires. Precisely in proportion to the depth 
of mind from which it issued, so high does it 
soar, so long does it sing. 

Or, I might say, it depends on how far the 
process had gone, of transmuting life into 
truth. In proportion to the completeness of 
the distillation, so v^all the purity and im- 
perishableness of the product be. But none 
is quite perfect. As no air-pump can by any 
means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can 
any artist entirely exclude the conventional, 
the local, the perishable from his book, or 
write a book of pure thought, that shall be 
as efficient, in all respects, to a remote pos- 
terity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the 
155 



Emerson 

second age. Each age, it is found, must 
write its own books ; or rather, each genera- 
tion for the next succeeding. The books of 
an older period will not fit this. 

Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The 
sacredness which attaches to the act of crea- 
tion, the act of thought, is transferred to the 
record. The poet chanting w^as felt to be a 
divine man: henceforth the chant is divine 
also. The writer was a just and wise spirit ; 
henceforvv^ard it is settled the book is perfect ; 
as love of the hero corrupts into worship 
of his statue. Instantly the book becomes 
noxious : the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish 
and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to 
open to the incursions of Reason, having 
once so opened, having once received this 
book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry 
if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. 
Books are written on it by thinkers, not by 
Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, 
who start v^^rong, who set out from accepted 
dogmas, not from their own sight of princi- 
ples. Meek young men grow up in libraries, 
believing it their duty to accept the views 
w^hich Cicero, which Locke, \vhich Bacon, 
haA^e given ; forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and 
Bacon w^ere only young men in libraries 
v^^hen they w^rote these books. 

Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have 
the bookworm. Hence the book -learned 
class, Avho value books, as such; not as re- 
156 



The American Scholar 

lated to nature and the human constitution, 
but as making a sort of Third Estate with 
the w^orld and the soul. Hence the restorers 
of readings, the emendators, the bibhoma- 
niacs of all degrees. 

Books are the best of things, well used; 
abused, amongst the worst. What is the 
right use? What is the one end which all 
means go to effect? They are for nothing 
but to inspire. I had better never see a book 
than to be Avarped by its attraction clean 
out of my own orbit, and made a satellite 
instead of a system. The one thing in the 
world, of value, is the active soul. This 
every man is entitled to ; this every man con- 
tains v^dthin him, although in almost all men 
obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul 
active sees absolute truth and utters truth, 
or creates. In this action it is genius; not 
the privilege of here and there a favorite, but 
the sound estate of every man. In its essence 
it is progressive. The book, the college, the 
school of art, the institution of any kind, 
stop with some past utterance of genius. 
This is good, say they, — let us hold by this. 
They pin me down. The\^ look backward 
and not forward. But genius looks forward : 
the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not 
in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates. 
Whatever talents may be, if the man create 
not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his ; — 
cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet 
157 



Emerson 

flame. There are creative manners, there are 
creative actions, and creative words; man- 
ners, actions, words, that is, indicative of no 
custom or atithorit\% but springing spon- 
taneous from the mind's own sense of good 
and fair. 

On the other part, instead of being its OAvn 
seer, let it receive from another mind its 
truth, though it were in torrents of light, 
without periods of solitude, inquest, and self- 
recoverv, and a fatal disservice is done. 
Genius is alwa^^s sufiicientlv the enemy of 
genius by over-influence. The literature of 
every nation bears me witness. The English 
dramatic poets have Shakspearized nov^ for 
two hundred ^^ears. 

Undoubtedly there is a right way of read- 
ing, so it be sternly subordinated. Man 
Thinking must not be subdued by his instru- 
ments. Books are for the scholar's idle 
times. When he can read God directh^, the 
hour is too precious to be ^vasted in other 
men's transcripts of their readings. But 
w^hen the intervals of darkness come, as come 
they must, — when the sun is hid and the 
stars withdraw their shining, — we repair to 
the lamps which were kindled by their raj^, 
to guide our steps to the East again, where 
the dawm is. We hear, that we ma}^ speak. 
The Arabian proverb saA'-s, ''A fig tree, look- 
ing on a fig tree, becometh fruitful." 

It is remarkable, the character of the 
158 



The American Scholar 

pleasure w^e derive from the best books. 
rhe\^ impress us with the conviction that one 
nature wrote and the same reads. We read 
the verses of one of the great English poets, 
of Chaucer, of Marvell, of Dryden, with the 
most modern joy, — with a pleasure, I mean, 
which is in great part caused by the ab- 
straction of all time from their verses. There 
is some awe mixed with the joy of our sur- 
prise, when this poet, who lived in some 
past \vorld, two or three hundred years ago, 
says that which lies close to my OAvn soul, 
that Avhich I also had Avellnigh thought and 
said. But for the evidence thence afforded to 
the philosophical doctrine of the identity of 
all minds, we should suppose some preestab- 
lished harmony, some foresight of souls that 
were to be, and some preparation of stores 
for their future wants, like the fact observed 
in insects, who lay up food before death for 
the young grub they shall never see. 

I would not be hurried by any love of 
system, by any exaggeration of instincts, to 
underrate the Book. We all kno^v, that as 
the human body can be nourished on any 
food, though it were boiled grass and the 
broth of shoes, so the human mind can be 
fed by any knowledge. And great and heroic 
men have existed who had almost no other 
information than by the printed page. I 
only would say that it needs a strong head 
to bear that diet. One must be an inventor 
159 



Emerson 

to read \vell. As the proverb sa^^s, ''He that 
would bring home the w'-ealth of the Indies, 
must carry out the wealth of the Indies." 
There is then creative reading as well as 
creative writing. When the mind is braced 
by labor and invention, the page of whatever 
book Ave read becomes luminous with mani- 
fold allusion. Every sentence is doubly sig- 
nificant, and the sense of our author is as 
broad as the world. We then see, what is 
alw^ays true, that as the seer's hour of vision 
is short and rare among heavy da^^s and 
months, so is its record, perchance, the least 
part of his volume. The discerning will read, 
in his Plato or Shakspeare, only that least 
part, — only the authentic utterances of the 
oracle ; — all the rest he rejects, were it never 
so many times Plato's and Shakspeare's. 

Of course there is a portion of reading quite 
indispensable to a Avise man. History and 
exact science he must learn by laborious read- 
ing. Colleges, in like manner, have their in- 
dispensable ofiice, — to teach elements. But 
they can only highly serve us when they aim 
not to drill, but to create ; when they gather 
from far every ray of various genius to their 
hospitable halls, and by the concentrated 
fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame. 
Thought and knowledge are natures in which 
apparatus and pretension avail nothing. 
Gowns and pecuniary foundations, though of 
towns of gold, can never countervail the 
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The American Scholar 

least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget 
this, and our American colleges will recede in 
their public importance, whilst they grow 
richer every year. 

III. There goes in the world a notion that 
the scholar should be a recluse, a valetudi- 
narian, — as unfit for any handiwork or public 
labor as a penknife for an axe. The so-called 
"practical men" sneer at speculative men, as 
if, because they speculate or see, they could 
do nothing. I have heard it said that the 
clergy, — who are always, more universally 
than any other class, the scholars of their 
da}^, — are addressed as women; that the 
rough, spontaneous conversation of men they 
do not hear, but onl\^ a mincing and diluted 
speech. The^^ are often virtually disfran- 
chised; and indeed there are advocates for 
their celibac\^ As far as this is true of the 
studious classes, it is not just and \vise. 
Action is with the scholar subordinate, but 
it is essential. Without it he is not yet man. 
Without it thought can never ripen into 
truth. W^hilst the w^orld hangs before the eye 
as a cloud of beauty, we cannot even see its 
beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but there can 
be no scholar without the heroic mind. The 
preamble of thought, the transition through 
which it passes from the unconscious to the 
conscious, is action. Onh^ so much do I 
know, as I have lived. Instantly we know 
11 161 



Emerson 

whose words are loaded with Hfe, and whose 
not. 

The world, — this shadow of the soul, or 
other me, lies Avide around. Its attractions 
are the kej^s ^^hich unlock mj thoughts and 
make me acquainted with myself. I run 
eagerly into this resounding tumult. I grasp 
the hands of those next me, and take my 
place in the ring to suffer and to w^ork, 
taught by an instinct that so shall the dumb 
abyss be vocal AT^nth speech. I pierce its 
order; I dissipate its fear; I dispose of it 
wathin the circuit of my expanding life. So 
much only of life as I know by experience, so 
much of the ^alderness have I vanquished 
and planted, or so far have I extended my 
being, my dominion. I do not see how^ any 
man can afford, for the sake of his nerves 
and his nap, to spare any action in w^hich he 
can partake. It is pearls and rubies to his 
discourse. Drudgery, calamxity, exasperation, 
want, are instructors in eloquence and wis- 
dom. The true scholar grudges every oppor- 
tunity of action past by, as a loss of power. 

It is the raw material out of which the 
intellect moulds her splendid products. A 
strange process too, this by which experience 
is converted into thought, as a mulberrj^ leaf 
is converted into satin. The manufacture 
goes forward at all hours. 

The actions and events of our childhood 
and youth are now matters of calmest ob- 
162 



The American Scholar 

servation. Thev lie like fair pictures in the 
air. Not so with our recent actions, — with 
the business which we nowr have in hand. 
On this we are quite unable to speculate. 
Our affections as yet circulate through it. 
We no more feel or know it than we feel the 
feet, or the hand, or the brain of our body. 
The ne^^ deed is yet a part of life, — remains 
for a time immersed in our unconscious life. 
In some contemplative hour it detaches itself 
from the life like a ripe fruit, to become a 
thought of the mind. Instantly it is raised, 
transfigured; the corruptible has put on in- 
corruption. Henceforth it is an object of 
beauty, however base its origin and neigh- 
borhood. Observe too the impossibility of 
antedating this act. In its grub state, it 
cannot fl\'', it cannot shine, it is a dull grub. 
But suddenly, without observation, the self- 
same thing unfurls beautiful wings, and is 
an angel of wisdom. So is there no fact, no 
event, in our private history, which shall not, 
sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, 
and astonish us bv soaring- from our bodv 
into the empyrean. Cradle and infancy, 
school and playground, the fear of boys, and 
dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and 
berries, and man\^ another fact that once 
filled the whole sk}-, are gone already ; friend 
and relative, profession and party, town and 
country, nation and world, must also soar 
and sing. 

163 



Emerson 

Of course, he ayHo has put forth his total 
strength in fit actions has the richest return 
of Avisdom. I wdll not shut myself out of 
this globe of action, and transplant an oak 
into a flower-pot, there to hunger and pine ; 
nor trust the revenue of some single faculty, 
and exhaust one vein of thought, much like 
those Savoyards, ^^ho, getting their liveli- 
hood by carving shepherds, shepherdesses, and 
smoking Dutchmen, for all Europe, went out 
one day to the mountain to find stock, and 
discovered that they had whittled up the last 
of their pine-trees. Authors we have, in 
numbers, who have written out their vein, 
and who, moved by a commendable pru- 
dence, sail for Greece or Palestine, follow the 
trapper into the prairie, or ramble round 
Algiers, to replenish their merchantable 
stock. 

If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar 
w^ould be covetous of action. Life is our 
dictionary. Years are w^ell spent in country 
labors; in toAA^n; in the insight into trades 
and manufactures ; in frank intercourse with 
many men and women; in science; in art; 
to the one end of mastering in all their facts 
a language by which to illustrate and em- 
body our perceptions. I learn immediately 
from any speaker how^ much he has already 
lived, through the poverty or the splendor of 
his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry 
from whence we get tiles and copestones for 
164 



The American Scholar 

the masonry" of to-day. This is the ^A^ay to 
learn grammar. Colleges and books only 
copy the language which the field and the 
work-yard made. 

But the final value of action, like that of 
books, and better than books, is that it is a 
resource. That great principle of Undulation 
in nature, that shows itself in the inspiring 
and expiring of the breath; in desire and 
satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in 
day and night ; in heat and cold ; and, as yet 
more deeply ingrained in every atom and 
every fluid, is kno^vn to us under the name 
of Polarity, — these ''fits of easy transmission 
and reflection," as Newton called them, — are 
the law of nature because they are the law 
of spirit. 

The m.ind now thinks, no^v acts, and each 
fit reproduces the other. When the artist has 
exhausted his materials, when the fancy no 
longer paints, when thoughts are no longer 
apprehended and books are a weariness, — he 
has always the resource to live. Character 
is higher than intellect. Thinking is the func- 
tion. Living is the functionary. The stream 
retreats to its source. A great soul will be 
strong to live, as well as strong to think. 
Does he lack organ or medium to impart his 
truth? He can still fall back on this elemen- 
tal force of living them. This is a total act. 
Thinking is a partial act. Let the grandeur 
of justice shine in his aflfairs. Let the beauty 
165 



Emerson 

of affection cheer his lowly roof. Those 'Tar 
from fame," who dwell and act with him, 
will feel the force of his constitution in the 
doings a.nd passages of the day better than 
it can be measured by any public and de- 
signed display. Time shall teach him that 
the scholar loses no hour which the man 
lives. Herein he unfolds the sacred germ of 
his instinct, screened from influence. What is 
lost in seemliness is gained in strength. Not 
out of those on \vhom s^-^stems of education 
have exhausted their culture, comes the help- 
ful giant to destroy the old or to build the 
new, but out of unhandselled savage nature; 
out of terrible Druids and Berserkers come at 
last Alfred and Shakspeare. 

I hear therefore \vith joy whatever is be- 
ginning to be said of the dignit\^ and neces- 
sity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue 
yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as 
\A^ell as for unlearned hands. And labor is 
every^^here w^elcome ; always we are invited 
to work; only be this limitation observed, 
that a man shall not for the sake of wider 
activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular 
judgments and modes of action. 

I haA^e now spoken of the education of the 
scholar by nature, b}- books, and by action. 
It remains to say somewhat of his duties. 

They are such as become Man Thinking. 
They may all be comprised in self-trust. The 
166 



The American Scholar 

office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and 
to guide men by showing them facts amidst 
appearances. He plies the slow, nnhonored, 
and unpaid task of observation. Flamsteed 
and Herschel, in their glazed observatories, 
may catalogue the stars with the praise of 
all men, and the results being splendid and 
useful, honor is sure. But he, in his private 
observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebu- 
lous stars of the human mind, which as yet 
no man has thought of as such, — watching 
days and months som^etimes for a few facts ; 
correcting still his old records; — must relin- 
quish display and immediate fame. In the 
long period of his preparation he must betray 
often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popu- 
lar arts, incurring the disdain of the able 
who shoulder him aside. Long he must 
stammer in his speech ; often forego the living 
for the dead. Worse \^et, he must accept, — 
how often! poverty and solitude. For the 
ease and pleasure of treading the old road, 
accepting the fashions, the education, the re- 
ligion of societ}^, he takes the cross of making 
his own and, of course, the self-accusation, 
the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and 
loss of time, which are the nettles and tan- 
gling vines in the way of the self-reh4ng and 
self-directed; and the state of virtual hos- 
tility in which he seems to stand to society, 
and especially to educated society. For all 
this loss and scorn, what offset? He is to 
167 



Emerson 

find consolation In exercising the highest 
functions of human nature. He is one who 
raises himself from private considerations 
and breathes and lives on public and illustri- 
ous thoughts. He is the world's e\^e. He is 
the w^orld's heart. He is to resist the vulgar 
prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbar- 
ism, hy preserving and communicating heroic 
sentiments, noble biographies, melodious 
verse, and the conclusions of history. What- 
soever oracles the human heart, in all emer- 
gencies, in all solemn hours, has uttered as 
its commentary on the w^orld of actions, — 
these he shall receive and impart. And what- 
soever new verdict Reason from her inviola- 
ble seat pronounces on the passing men and 
events of to-day, — this he shall hear and pro- 
mulgate. 

These being his functions, it becomes him 
to feel all confidence in himself, and to defer 
never to the popular cr\^ He and he only 
knows the w^orld. The world of any moment 
is the merest appearance. Some great de- 
corum, some fetish of a government, some 
ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up 
by half mankind and cried down by the other 
half, as if all depended on this particular up 
or down. The odds are that the whole ques- 
tion is not worth the poorest thought which 
the scholar has lost in listening to the con- 
troversy. Let him not quit his belief that a 
popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and 
168 



The American Scholar 

honorable of the earth affirm it to be the 
crack of doom. In silence, in steadiness, in 
severe abstraction, let him hold by 'himself; 
add observation to observation, patient of 
neglect, patient of reproach, and bide his own 
time, — happy enough if he can satisfy him- 
self alone that this day he has seen some- 
thing truly. Success treads on every right 
step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts 
him to tell his brother what he thinks. He 
then learns that in going down into the 
secrets of his own mind he has descended 
into the secrets of all minds. He learns that 
he who has mastered any law in his private 
thoughts, is master to that extent of all men 
v^^hose language he speaks, and of all into 
whose language his own can be translated. 
The poet, in utter solitude remembering his 
spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is 
found to have recorded that which men in 
crowded cities find true for them also. The 
orator distrusts at first the fitness of his 
frank confessions, his want of knowledge of 
the persons he addresses, until he finds that 
he is the complement of his hearers; — that 
they drink his w^ords because he fulfils for 
them their oAvn nature ; the deeper he dives 
into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to 
his wonder he finds this is the most accepta- 
ble, most public, and universally true. The 
people delight in it ; the better part of every 
man feels, This is my music ; this is myself. 
169 



Emerson 

In self-trust all the virtues are compre- 
hended. Free should the scholar be, — free 
and brave. Free even to the definition of 
freedom, ''without any hindrance that does 
not arise out of his own constitution. '^ 
Brave ; for fear is a thing which a scholar by 
his very function puts behind him. Fear al- 
wa^^s springs from ignorance. It is a shame 
to him if his tranquillity, amid dangerous 
times, arise from the presumption that like 
children and women his is a protected class ; 
or if he seek a temporary peace by the diver- 
sion of his thoughts from politics or vexed 
questions, hiding his head like an ostrich in 
the floAvering bushes, peeping into micro- 
scopes, and turning rhj^mes, as a boy 
whistles to keep his courage up. So is the 
danger a danger still; so is the fear worse. 
Manlike let him turn and face it. Let him 
look into its eye and search its nature, in- 
spect its origin, — see the whelping of this 
lion, — which lies no great way back ; he will 
then find in himself a perfect comprehension 
of its nature and extent ; he will have made 
his hands meet on the other side, and can 
henceforth defy it and pass on superior. The 
world is his \vho can see through its preten- 
sion. What deafiiess, w^hat stone-blind cus- 
tom, what overgrow^n error you behold is 
there only by sufierance, — b}^ your suflTerance. 
See it to be a lie, and you have already 
dealt it its mortal blow. 
170 



The American Scholar 

Yes, we are the cowed, — we the trustless. 
It is a mischievous notion that we are come 
late into nature ; that the world was finished 
a long time ago. As the world was plastic 
and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to 
so much of his attributes as we bring to it. 
To ignorance and sin, it is flint. They adapt 
themselves to it as they may; but in propor- 
tion as a man has any thing in him divine, 
the firmament flows before him and takes his 
signet and form. Not he is great who can 
alter m.atter, but he who can alter my state 
of mind. The\" are the kings of the world 
who give the color of their present thought 
to all nature a,nd all art, and persuade men 
by the cheerful serenity of their carrying the 
matter, that this thing Vv^hich they do is the 
apple which the ages have desired to pluck, 
noAv at last ripe, and inviting nations to the 
harvest. The great man makes the great 
thing. Wherever Macdonald sits, there is the 
head of the table. Linnaus makes botany 
the most alluring of studies, and wins it from 
the farmer and the herb-woman; Davy, 
chemistry; and Cuvier, fossils. The day is 
alw^ays his who works in it w4th serenity 
and great aims. The unstable estimates of 
men crowd to him Avhose mind is filled with 
a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic 
follo^v the moon. 

For this self-trust, the reason is deeper than 
can be fathomed, — darker than can be en- 
171 



Emerson 

lightened. I might not carry wath me the 
feehng of my audience in stating my own 
behef. But I have alread}^ shown the ground 
of my hope, in adverting to the doctrine that 
man is one. I beheve man has been wronged ; 
he has wronged himself. He has almost lost 
the light that can lead him back to his pre- 
rogatives. Men are become of no account. 
Men in history, men in the w^orld of to-day, 
are bugs, are spawn, and are called ''the 
mass'' and "the herd." In a century, in a 
millennium, one or two men ; that is to say, 
one or tw^o approximations to the right 
state of every man. All the rest behold in 
the hero or the poet their OAvn green and 
crude being, — ripened; yes, and are content 
to be less, so that may attain to its fiill 
stature. What a testimom^, full of grandeur, 
full of pity, is borne to the demands of his 
own nature, by the poor clansinan, the poor 
partisan, who rejoices in the glory of his chief. 
The poor and the low find some amends to 
their immense moral capacity", for their ac- 
quiescence in a political and social inferiority'. 
They are content to be brushed like flies 
from the path of a great person, so that 
justice shall be done by him to that common 
nature which it is the dearest desire of all to 
see enlarged and glorified. Thc}^ sun them- 
selves in the great man's light, and feel it to 
be their own element. They cast the dignity 
of man from their downtrod selves upon the 
172 



The American Scholar 

shoulders of a hero, and will perish to add 
one drop of blood to make that great heart 
beat, those giant sinews combat and con- 
quer. He lives for us, and we live in him. 

Men such as they are, very naturally seek 
money or power ; and powder because it is as 
good as money, — the "spoils,'^ so called, "of 
office." And y^^hy not? for they aspire to the 
highest, and this, in their sleep-walking, they 
dream is highest. Wake them and the\^ shall 
quit the false good and leap to the true, and 
leaye goyernments to clerks and desks. This 
revolution is to be wrought by the gradual 
domestication of the idea of Culture. The 
main enterj^rise of the world for S23lendor, for 
extent, is the upbuilding of a man. Here are 
the materials strewn along the ground. The 
private life of one man shall be a more il- 
lustrious monarchy, more formidable to its 
enemy, more sweet and serene in its influence 
to its friend, than any kingdom in history. 
For a man, rightly viewed, comprehendeth 
the particular natures of all men. Each 
philosopher, each bard, each actor has only 
done for me, as by a delegate, what one day 
I can do for myself. The books ^^hich once 
we valued more than the apple of the eye, we 
have quite exhausted. What is that but sa\^- 
ing that v^^e have come tip with the point of 
view which the universal mind took through 
the eyes of one scribe; we have been that 
man, and have passed on. First, one, then 
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Emerson 

another, we drain all cisterns, and waxing 
greater by all these supplies, we crave a bet- 
ter and more abundant food. The man has 
never lived that can feed ns ever. The human 
mind cannot be enshrined in a person who 
shall set a barrier on any one side to this 
unbounded, unboundable empire. It is one 
central fire, which, flaming now out of the 
lips of Etna, lightens the capes of Sicih^, and 
now out of the throat of Vesuvius, illumi- 
nates the tov^^ers and vineyards of Naples. 
It is one light \vhich beams out of a thou- 
sand stars. It is one soul w^hich animates 
all men. 

But I have dv^elt perhaps tediously upon 
this abstraction of the Scholar. I ought not 
to delay longer to add what I have to say 
of nearer reference to the time and to this 
country. 

Historically, there is thought to be a dif- 
ference in the ideas v^^hich predominate over 
successive epochs, and there are data for 
marking the genius of the Classic, of the Ro- 
mantic, and now of the Reflective or Philo- 
sophical age. With the views I have inti- 
mated of the oneness or the identitj- of the 
mind through all individuals, I do not much 
dwell on these diflerences. In fact, I believe 
each individual passes through all three. 
The boy is a Greek ; the youth, romantic ; the 
adult, reflective. I deny not hoAvever that a 
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The American Scholar 

revolution in the leading idea may be dis- 
tinctly enough traced. 

Our age is be^wailed as the age of Introver- . 
sion. Must that needs be evil? We, it seems, 
are critical ; we are embarrassed v^ith second 
thoughts; we cannot enjoy anything for 
hankering to know v^hereof the pleasure con- 
sists; ^we are lined ^th eyes; \v€: see v.ath 
our feet; the time is infected v^ith Hamlet's 
unhappiness, — 

''Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." 

It is so bad then? Sight is the last thing to 
be pitied. Would ^^e be blind? Do v^^e fear 
lest we should outsee nature and God, and 
drink truth dry? I look upon the discontent 
of the literary class as a mere announcement 
of the fact that they find themselves not in 
the state of mind of their fathers, and regret 
the coming state as untried ; as a boy dreads 
the Avater before he has learned that he can 
swim. If there is any period one ^^ould de- 
sire to be born in, is it not the age of Revo- 
lution ; when the old and the new is t and side 
by side and admit of being compared ; when 
the energies of all men are searched b\^ fear 
and by hope; when the historic glories of the 
old can be compensated by the rich possi- 
bilities of the nev^^ era? This time, like all 
times, is a very good one, if \yc but know 
what to do with it. 
I read with some joy of the auspicious 
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Emerson 

signs of the coining days, as they glimmer al- 
ready through poetr^^ and art, through phi- 
losophy and science, through church and state. 
One of these signs is the fact that the same 
movement which effected the elevation of 
what was called the lowest class in the state, 
assumed in literature a very marked and as 
benign an aspect. Instead of the sublime 
and beautiful, the near, the low, the com- 
mon, was explored and poetized. That 
which had been negligently trodden under 
foot by those who were harnessing and pro- 
visioning themselves for long journeys into 
far countries, is suddenly found to be richer 
than all foreign parts. The literature of the 
poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy 
of the street, the meaning of household life, 
are the topics of the time. It is a great 
stride. It is a sign, — is it not? of newr vigor 
Avhen the extremities are made active, v^^hen 
currents of warm life run into the hands and 
the feet. I ask not for the great, the remote, 
the romantic ; what is doing in Italy or Ara- 
bia; Avhat is Greek art, or Provencal min- 
strelsy ; I embrace the common, I explore and 
sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give 
me insight into to-day, and you may have 
the antique and future worlds. What would 
we really know the meaning of? The meal 
in the firkin ; the milk in the pan ; the ballad 
in the street; the news of the boat; the 
glance of the eye ; the form and the gait of 
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The American Scholar 

the bodj;--show me the ultimate reason of 
these matters ; show me the sublime presence 
of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as al- 
ways it does lurk, in these suburbs and ex- 
tremities of nature; let me see every trifle 
bristling with the polarity that ranges it in- 
stantly on an eternal law ; and the shop, the 
plough, and the ledger referred to the like 
cause by w^hich light undulates and poets 
sing; — and the world lies no longer a dull 
miscellany and lumber-room, but has form 
and order ; there is no trifle, there is no puz- 
zle, but one design unites and animates the 
farthest pinnacle and the low^est trench. 

This idea has inspired the genius of Gold- 
smith, Burns, Cow^per, and, in a ne^^er time, 
of Goethe, Wordsworth, and Carlyle. This 
idea they have differently followed and with 
various success. In contrast with their 
-writing, the style of Pope, of Johnson, of Gib- 
bon, looks cold and pedantic. This writing 
is blood-warm. Man is surprised to find that 
things near are not less beautiful and -won- 
drous than things remote. The near explains 
the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man 
is related to all nature. This perception of 
the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in dis- 
coveries. Goethe, in this very thing the most 
modern of the moderns, has shown us, as 
none ever did, the genius of the ancients. 

There is one man of genius who has done 
much for this philosophy of life, whose liter- 
12 177 



Emerson 

arj value has never jet been rightly^ esti- 
mated; — I mean Emanuel S\vedenborg. The 
most imaginative of men, jet writing with 
the precision of a mathematician, he endeav- 
ored to engraft a purelj philosophical Ethics 
on the popular Christianitj of his time. 
Such an attempt of course must have diffi- 
cultj which no genius could surmount. But 
he saw and showed the connection between 
nature and the affections of the soul. He 
pierced the emblematic or spiritual character 
of the visible, audible, tangible world. Espe- 
ciallj did his shade-loving muse hover over 
and interpret the lower parts of nature ; he 
showed the m jsterious bond that allies moral 
evil to the foul material forms, and has given 
in epical parables a theorj of insanitj, 
of beasts, of unclean and fearful things. 

Another sign of our times, also marked bj 
an analogous political movement, is the new 
importance given to the single person. 
Everj thing that tends to insulate the in- 
dividual, — to surround him with barriers of 
natural respect, so that each man shall feel 
the w^orld is his, and man shall treat with 
man as a sovereign state with a sovereign 
state, — tends to true union as well as great- 
ness. **I learned,'' said the melancholj Pes- 
talozzi, ^*that no man in God's wide earth is 
either willing or able to help anj other 
mxan." Help must come from the bosom 
alone. The scholar is that man who must 
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The American Scholar 

take up into himself all the ability of the 
time, all the contributions of the past, all the 
hopes of the future. He must be an univer- 
sity of knowledges. If there be one lesson 
more than another which should pierce his 
ear, it is. The world is nothing, the man is 
all ; in yourself is the law of all nature, and 
you know not yet ho^w a globule of sap 
ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of 
Reason; it is for you to know all; it is for 
you to dare all. Mr. President and Gentle- 
men, this confidence in the unsearched might 
of man belongs, by all motives, by all proph- 
ecy, by all preparation, to the American 
Scholar. We have listened too long to the 
courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the 
American freeman is already suspected to be 
timid, imitative, tame. Public and private 
avarice make the air we breathe thick and 
fat. The scholar is decent, indolent, com- 
plaisant. See already the tragic consequence. 
The mind of this country, taught to aim at 
low objects, eats upon itself. There is no 
work for any but the decorous and the com- 
plaisant. Young men of the fairest promise, 
who begin life upon our shores, inflated by 
the mountain winds, shined upon by all the 
stars of God, find the earth below not in 
unison with these, but are hindered from 
action by the disgust which the principles on 
which business is managed inspire, and turn 
drudges, or die of disgust, some of them 
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ifie 



Emerson 

suicides. What is the remedy? They did not 
yet see, and thousands- of young men as 
hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the 
career do not yet see, that if the single man 
plant himself indomitably on his instincts, 
and there abide, the huge world will come 
round to him. Patience — patience; with the 
shades of all the good and great for com- 
pany; and for solace the perspective of your 
OAvn infinite life ; and for work the study and 
the communication of principles, the making 
those instincts prevalent, the conversion of 
the Tvorld. Is it not the chief disgrace in the 
world, not to be an unit; — not to be reck- 
oned one character ; — not to yield that pecul- 
iar fruit which each man was created to 
bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the 
hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the 
section, to which we belong; and our opin- 
ion predicted geographically, as the north, 
or the south? Not so, brothers and friends, 
— please God, ours shall not be so. We will 
\\ralk on our own feet; ^we will ^^ork with 
our o^wn hands; we will speak our o"wn 
minds. The study of letters shall be no 
longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for 
sensual indulgence. The dread of man and 
the love of man shall be a wall of defence 
and a wreath of joy around all. A nation 
of men will for the first time exist, because 
each believes himself inspired by the Divine 
Soul which also inspires all men. 
180 



